Late Show Host Stephen Colbert Reflects on His Mission to Combine His Faith and His Work to Create “A Show About Love”

When it comes to late-night talk shows, we want the hosts to make us laugh first and foremost, right? Well, a recent profile of Late Show host Stephen Colbert had The Sunday Paper team re-examining that expectation this week. 

As Colbert was hatching his CBS show, he said he consciously conceived it to be a show about love. According to Jon Batiste, the Late Show’s bandleader and close friend of Colbert’s, “When [Colbert] was taking over for Letterman, he told me the kind of show he wanted to do was a show about people and about love and about being a friend to the regular people out there,” Batiste told The Wall Street Journal. “Having shiny folks come on and genius intellectuals and politicians and celebrities, but also, at the core of that, being a show about people and community. I would argue that it’s taken a different form, but we’re doing that show.”

Bravo to Stephen Colbert for masterfully (and humorously!) combining his faith and his mission to do a show about love. As his wife Evie put it in the WSJ article: “The last two years, we’ve all been on the verge of tears, frankly, a lot,” she said. “I kind of feel sometimes that Stephen has become a grief counselor for people in real time on television. He didn’t seek that task out, and it’s hard. But that, I think, is his act of love.”