Stephen Colbert made an impassioned plea to the entertainment industry on Wednesday night:
Won’t you please give The Late Show‘s soon-to-be-unemployed staffers a good home?
Coming out of his opening monologue, Colbert said to viewers, “You may be familiar with a segment we do here called ‘Rescue Dog Rescue,’ where we help find homes for real rescue dogs.” (Jimmy Fallon joined Colbert for the latest installment just weeks ago.) “And I’m proud to say we have a perfect record of every single puppy getting adopted!”
With CBS’The Late Show coming to an end May 21, “I thought maybe I can do the same for my staff who’ll soon be looking for jobs,” Colbert said, before introducing the rejiggered “Rescue Staff Rescue” segment.
The twist: whereas “Rescue Dog Rescue” has Colbert telling a bald-faced but endearing lie about each pup, here he shared “actual, insane, humiliating and wonderful things” each staffer did on The Late Show‘s behalf.
For example, segment producer Jonah “had the distinct honor of once being my butt double for a mockup,” Colbert said. Jonah in turn confirmed, “My wife has always said I have the ass of a 61-year-old man.”
Late Show accountant Scott “has to go through all of our receipts for random props, like sex toys for sketches and sex toys for the monologue. Pretty much just sex toys,” Colbert said. When he asked how much the late-night show has spent over the years on such fare, Scott answered, “I don’t know, but the teleprompter says 69.”
Next up, editor Rachel was credited with adding “more fart sound effects into serious historical footage than she can possibly count.” Asked where she attended college, Rachel boasted “Harvard!,” before being nudged to correct her response to “Fart-vard.”
Colbert also brought out a producer who once had to spend a day supervising a live chicken, another producer who once “sat shirtless in a hot tub with a raw turkey (and contracted “super double salmonella” in the process), and a researcher who’s had to juggle field reporting on Iran’s nuclear program with figuring out if Colbert could say “twink” on live TV.
“Rescue Staff Rescue” wrapped with Maya, a writers’ assistant tasked with helping to clear “the idiotic things we write” with CBS. In that capacity, Colbert said, Maya has had to send “actual professional texts” that say things like “‘Okay to say ‘sit on your own balls’ here?,” “Okay to say ‘go to hell, you dead pervert’?” and “Hi, can we say ‘big ol’ [bleep]’?”
Asked for any parting words, Maya said, “I’m going to miss my colleagues tremendously. This has been among the greatest honors of my life. Also, big ol’ [bleep].”
Watch the segment above.
