“People still do these shows?”
That was Stephen Colbert’s opening line Tuesday night as he settled into the guest chair on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a little more than three months removed from doing essentially the same thing Jimmy Kimmel was doing across from him.
“Regularly,” Kimmel assured him.
“Late-night TV,” Colbert said. “I remember it well. Many fond memories of this.”
He was joking about late night as though it were already a distant memory. But for the next hour, he also seemed very much like a man enjoying the view from the other side.
Colbert was Kimmel’s only sit-down guest Tuesday, one night after the two men shared a table with Jon Stewart and their shared manager James “Baby Doll” Dixon at the Emmys, where The Late Show capped its final season with its first-ever Outstanding Variety Series win—one of seven Emmys the show took home this year.
Kimmel told Colbert that he’d seemed different at the awards—“happier” and “healthier.”
“Like I don’t drink a cup of poison every day?” Colbert replied.
He compared hosting a nightly topical show to being lowered “like carbon rods into a radioactive pool every day,” then pulled out and placed in front of a camera to radiate it back at the audience “at a nonlethal rad level.”
Kimmel nodded in recognition. “That’s exactly the job description.”
It was the kind of exchange that gave the hour an unusual subtext. Here were two late-night hosts who had spent years doing versions of the same job, sitting together after an especially bruising stretch. One of them had been forced out. The other was still reporting for duty, with an uncertain future.
The two hosts shared the story of Colbert, Kimmel, Stewart, and John Oliver gathering for a group picture at Monday night’s Emmys. Before snapping the pic, the photographer joked, “It’s the endangered table.”
The line visibly landed with a thud.
Colbert recalled smiling for the picture while muttering, “That joke’s not as funny as you think.”
And yet, strikingly, almost nothing about Tuesday night’s show felt mournful.
There was no airing of grievances. Colbert got in one good shot at his former employer when Kimmel asked whether anyone from CBS had called to congratulate him on the seven Emmys.
“I am not familiar with that organization,” Colbert said.
Otherwise, he seemed delighted to be there.
He talked about working in New Zealand on the new Lord of the Rings movie he’s writing with his son Peter, and enlisted his youngest son, John, by phone to help reenact the time an exceedingly polite New Zealand police officer pulled him over for speeding.
It was silly, loose, and almost aggressively unimportant—which may have been part of the point.
For years, Colbert’s job demanded that he ingest the news every day. Asked Tuesday whether he missed it, he answered simply, “Nope.”
“I have an opportunity to not think about the news every day?” he said. “And I took it.”
Notably, in an hour featuring two hosts whose shows have been defined in large part by the political moment, Donald Trump’s name never came up in their conversation.
Instead, they shaved Colbert.
Colbert had promised his wife, Evie, that he would lose the beard he grew after The Late Show ended if the show won an Emmy. Kimmel volunteered his studio for the job, and by the final segment, a freshly shorn Colbert was back looking remarkably like the guy who used to host an 11:35 show.
“Now I recognize you,” Kimmel told him.
It was a reminder of something that late night doesn’t get to demonstrate often enough: talk-show hosts make some of the very best talk-show guests. They know when to tell the story, when to heighten it, and when to get out of the way.
But the evening’s most resonant moment came at the end.
For nearly 20 years, through both The Colbert Report and The Late Show, a Captain America shield given to Colbert by Marvel hung on his set. When CBS dismantled The Late Show, Colbert knew exactly where he wanted it to go.
He sent it to Kimmel.
On Tuesday, Kimmel brought the shield out and asked Colbert if he could install it permanently on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! set.
“It’s your shield, man,” Colbert told him.
Kimmel carried it over to the producers’ well in front of the audience, and affixed it to the wall.
“I want to be able to see it when I’m doing the monologue every night,” he explained.
Then came one last joke, and maybe the line that said more about the night than either of them intended.
Kimmel hung the shield on the wall “for all-time,” he said, before correcting himself.
“Or at least however much time we have left.”
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