The Classiest Late-Night Host

When a celebrity stops by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, they aren’t there to lip-synch to a pop song. Colbert’s approach has been marked, instead, by a sincerity that’s rare in the 11:35 p.m. block: He had Joe Biden on during the coronavirus pandemic to discuss how to handle grief, and a conversation with Dua Lipa about Colbert’s Catholic faith seemed to come out of nowhere, light but never flippant. Colbert, a veteran comedy performer, doesn’t always take himself so seriously, of course; he was just as eager to ask former First Lady Michelle Obama to do an impression of her husband, Barack, and was delighted to hear the actor Saoirse Ronan speak in her native Irish accent.Colbert has never been shy about his intellectual bent. Whereas The Late Show’s prior steward, David Letterman, was happier to playfully bicker with guests, his successor took a surprisingly heady path. It ended up being the right one to chart: a calming counterbalance to Jimmy Fallon’s bite-size-clip harvesting and the more pointed political work being done by his peers Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver.Colbert has sprinkled earnestness amid the gags since he took the reins of The Late Show more than 10 years ago. It’s a tack unlike any other in late night; it will be unmistakably lost when he departs on May 21—and missed by both his viewers and his guests. When the filmmaker Christopher Nolan presented the trailer for his new blockbuster, The Odyssey, on the show earlier this month, for instance, his appearance was a rarity for the press-shy Oscar winner. Even more distinctive was Colbert’s eagerness to discuss the Homeric epic that Nolan was adapting: “I know you don’t do this very often—don’t do the late-night shows,” Colbert told him. “Only you, actually,” Nolan murmured in reply.Last July, The Late Show’s network, CBS, announced that the program would end its run the following May; CBS called the decision a purely financial one in the face of changing viewer behavior. No doubt,