The Late Show with Stephen Colbert had the last laugh at the Emmys Sunday. Despite CBS canceling the show, the late-night talker took home the award for outstanding talk series.
As host Stephen Colbert and his crew took the stage, the audience gave them a standing ovation with shouts of “Stephen, Stephen, Stephen.”
“Thank you for this honor,” he started his speech, before acknowledging the network that canceled him. “I want to thank CBS for giving us the privilege of being part of the late-night tradition, which I hope continues long after we’re no longer doing this show.”
“Ten year ago, in September of 2015, Spike Jonze stopped by my office and said, ‘Hey, what do you want this show to be about?’ And I said, ‘Ah, Spike, I don’t know how you could do it, but I kinda want to do a late-night comedy show that was about love,’” he said. “I don’t know if I ever figured that out, but at a certain point, and you can guess what that point was, I realized in some ways we were doing a late-night comedy show about loss.”
“And that’s related to love because sometimes you only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it,” he added.
“Ten years later in September of 2025, my friends, I have never loved my country more desperately. God bless America. Stay strong. Be brave,” he concluded his speech, before quoting Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”: “If the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor.”
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been nominated seven times in the outstanding talk series category. This was its first win.
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