“Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.” That was how Stephen Colbert’s alter ego, Stephen Colbert, welcomed his audience to the premiere episode of The Colbert Report in 2005. Posing as a satiric right-wing pundit and cable-news host, he would deliver ”truthiness,” a word the comedian coined and Merriam-Webster named word of the year in 2006, defining it as “a kind of ‘truth’ that is derived from a visceral feeling rather than from any known facts.” And after 20 years of The Colbert Report and the more straightforward Late Show with Stephen Colbert (he took over the storied 11:30 p.m timeslot on CBS from David Letterman), the now-cancelled host returned to the sentiment in his final show, telling viewers that along the way he realized his job was to “feel the news with you,” adding, “And I don’t know about you, but I sure have felt it.”

While the 62-year-old former Second City sketch comedian earned his fame skewering conservative media and politicians during the George W. Bush era – honing it to a fine point in the MAGA years – his humour has since broadened, with heartfelt and hilarious in-depth interviews with pundits, professors, presidents, pop stars and Hollywood personalities.

He also, for those paying close attention, spent over a decade hosting the longest-running unofficial roast of Canada and its people. From the tame: “Canada is America’s hat.” To the downright insulting: writing in his 2012 book, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t, “Before we can harness geothermal power, we have to take the planet’s temperature with a geothermometer. And I have no idea where the Earth’s rectum is!” The footnote at the bottom of the page reads: “Windsor, Canada.”

He jokes because he cares, right? He has taken the Canadian citizenship test, naming all three branches of our government: “The NHL, Tim Hortons, Alan Thicke.” He’s rewritten the lyrics of our national anthem to include “Oh Canada, the country we hold dear. All the sexy Ryans, also come from here.” And, he teared up looking at footage of Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers,who stopped the gunman during the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill in Ottawa: “Look at that magnificent bastard; stoic, humble,” says Colbert as Vickers returned to the House of Commons the very next day. “Folks, I have not been this moved by something this Canadian since the return of Degrassi.” His show also had a recurring sketch with a Mountie who comes up with ingenious names for Canadian beer and marijuana strains, from Beernaked Lagers and Univers-ale Health Care to Michael Bublaze and Mani-toke-a. And when Colbert welcomed then prime minister Justin Trudeau to the show in 2024, they got to the heart of softwood lumber tariffs and Canadian bacon. Only a year later, Colbert joked of Trudeau’s romance with Katy Perry, “As an American, I cannot stand for a Canadian maple-tapping one of our American pop stars” – and encouraged Hillary Clinton to set her sights on Drake. Commemorating the end of an era, Trudeau wished Colbert well, “For nearly 11 years, we’ve had the privilege of watching, learning and laughing with [you]. Congrats on an incredible run, Stephen. Can’t wait to see what you’ll do next.”

Now that the No. 1 late-night show in the U.S. has been pushed off air for … well, pick your reason – “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night”; the fact that CBS’s parent company Paramount was looking for federal approval for a merger; Colbert’s joke about Paramount and Donald Trump’s defamation settlement, which the host called “a big fat bribe”; or because the comedian is close friends with the Obamas – it seems bringing his show to Canada would make sense. There’s at least one Facebook campaign urging CBC to offer the host a spot on our public broadcaster. Canada would finally get its big late-night success story – with apologies to Mike Bullard, George Stroumboulopoulos, and exports Samantha Bee and Lilly Singh. And Colbert would feel at home, considering he once told Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara that they were his heroes, recalling seeing their pictures on the wall at Second City Chicago when he joined that comedy troupe in his 20s. And, it’s quite clear that the fake broadcast format of SCTV heavily influenced The Colbert Report.

Instead of coming North, though, Colbert is heading directly to Middle Earth, where he’s writing the next instalment of The Lord of the Rings franchise, which he’s been quietly developing with his son and LOTR director Peter Jackson for years. The hobbits’ gain is television’s loss. 

Colbert was more than just a host, poking the presidential bear. This devout Catholic family man from South Carolina was a role model for how to view and combat the absurdity of our world, speak truth, not truthiness, to power, lean into facts and education about constitutional law, executive powers and democracy, while also connecting with the audience on a human level, through humour, compassion and even spirituality. 

He’s the rare late-night talk show host who will embrace the topic of grief, believing it’s something that connects us: “Eventually, it comes for everyone,” he said during an interview with Joe Biden, after the then-vice president’s son Beau died of brain cancer. Colbert himself lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was only 10, which may have been why he was so moved after hearing Keanu Reeves’s answer to the question, “What happens when we die?” The actor told the host: “I know the ones who love us will miss us.” That exchange formed the basis for the Colbert Questionert, and allowed the host to discuss the afterlife with hundreds of guests, including Barack Obama, who said basically the same thing as Reeves; Michelle Obama, who said, “We go to heaven … or, I do”; and one of his favourite Canadian Ryans. “We wake up,” said Gosling, leaving Colbert at a loss for words.

Keeping to that existential theme, Colbert’s final episode had an overarching, sci-fi-late-night-into-the-void-wormhole joke that encompassed years of zeitgeisty angst. Meanwhile, there was a star-studded party in full effect, with the host welcoming famous friends, mentors like The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, and comedy peers. The other sexy Canadian Ryan stopped by, thinking he might be the final guest. “Ouchy,” Reynolds said when told he wasn’t. That honour belonged to Paul McCartney, who shared his own recollections of the Beatles’ 1964 breakthrough performance in America at the Ed Sullivan Theater, playing in the exact spot where Colbert’s desk now sits. Together (along with special guests Elvis Costello and former band leader Jon Batiste), the host and Macca performed the very fitting Beatles song, Hello, Goodbye, “I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello.” And then Colbert convinced McCartney to turn off the lights at the Ed Sullivan Theater, a cultural bookending moment both symbolic and bittersweet.

But most satisfying of all, Jon Stewart cleared up late-night’s greatest mystery, offhandedly revealing that Stephen was actually “fired for stealing printer cartridges.”