Strike Force Five’s New 13th Episode Is All About Stephen Colbert

Strike Force Five has struck again.

Two-and-a-half years after Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver last assembled behind microphones during the 2023 writers strike, the late-night quintet reunited for what they dubbed an “unlucky” 13th episode—recorded Monday night after their joint appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and released Wednesday morning.

The occasion this time wasn’t strike solidarity but Colbert solidarity, with The Late Show now in its final stretch ahead of its May 21 series finale. The special episode, sponsored once again by Mint Mobile, benefits World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit that has also been the beneficiary of Colbert’s ongoing “Everything Must Go!” memorabilia auction.

Kimmel opened the episode by noting that Mint Mobile had made “a sizable donation” to World Central Kitchen, before the group turned to the matter at hand: how Colbert is handling the end of his CBS run.

Asked whether it had sunk in, Colbert answered, “Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s super real.”

“I feel, what I’ve said is that the emotion has—the rising tide of emotion has reached my chin,” he said. “And now the only thing to do is, like, take a deep breath and, like, swim like hell to May 21st.”

Colbert said the emotional conversations with staff tend to happen after the show tapes each night, not during the workday. “There’s no use to having human emotions during the day,” he joked. “I do have a switch I can turn off.”

That led Oliver to point out that Colbert once literally hosted The Late Show while his body was “trying to kill” him—referring to the night in 2023 when Colbert’s appendix burst.

“My appendix burst and I did two shows actually,” Colbert recalled. “It was a two-show night. I did two shows.” During commercial breaks, he said, “my producers would stand between me and the audience so I could weep without being seen by the audience.”

Asked whether he’s tired of being asked what’s next, Colbert compared himself to “a college senior.”

“‘So what do you got lined up? What are you doing?’” he said. “I’m like, I don’t know. This show takes all of my mind—like, 95% of my mind every day—to do this show. Until it’s over, I don’t really know.”

Colbert said he has taken meetings with people who tell him, “We wanna be in the Stephen Colbert business.”

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “What is that? Could you tell me please? Do you wanna do The Late Show on CBS at the Ed Sullivan Theater? ’Cause that’s the business I’m in.”

Colbert noted, as he has elsewhere, that other life events are helping him keep the show’s end in perspective.

“My son graduates college on the 18th. My show ends on the 21st. My brother gets married on the 23rd,” Colbert said. “So I’m kind of sandwiched between things that are, like, a little more important.”

After that, he said, comes the clean-out.

“We gotta get our sh*t out of here,” Colbert said. “No one’s got a job after that night. I think the next day everyone’s fired.”

His show suits, at least, appear to have survived.

“Originally they said I couldn’t have any of my suits,” Colbert revealed. “And then we said, ‘Well, we’re just gonna sell them for charity.’ And they went, ‘Okay, you can do that.’ And then they said, ‘All right, you can have your suits.’”

Colbert said he’s giving many of them away, including trying to get his sons fitted. He also revealed that he has “like, 18 tuxedos at this point,” prompting the group to propose a party where everyone wears one of Colbert’s tuxes.

“Do we know 18 people?” Fallon asked.

“Men?” Colbert replied. “Do you have a lot of friends? No. I don’t think so.”

Other choice moments from the episode:

• “Strike Force Wives” returned—and Fallon’s hosting skills were once again part of the joke. The original run’s most memorable bit got a revival, with Fallon asking the other hosts questions he had already posed to their wives. But before the game even started, Oliver admitted that when wife Kate Norley told him Fallon had texted her, his reaction was, “Motherf*cker, he’s done it again.” Fallon insisted, “This one’s much better,” prompting Oliver to remind him, “You were really confident last time, to be fair.” The segment later hit peak Fallon when, in the interest of speed, he asked Colbert what was essentially a three-part question about why Evie fell in love with him, whether he was still the same person, and what had changed.
• Colbert read a Ryan Reynolds-written Mint Mobile ad. Reynolds, who recorded ads for the original 12-episode run of Strike Force Five, was apparently too busy to record one this time—but did send copy for Colbert to read. It began: “Are you recently out of a job? Or will be on May 22nd? Well, good news…”
• The hosts discussed the occupational hazard of comedy writers noticing everything. After a story about Seth Meyers reflexively covering the spot where his mic would be—even when he wasn’t mic’d—the group riffed on what happens when comedy writers detect anything mockable. Oliver recalled his former Daily Show colleague Aasif Mandvi wearing a pair of barefoot shoes to the office, while Meyers brought up Late Night writer Mike Scollins wearing a tank top to work. Oliver summed up the lesson: “There’s no more permanent mistake than a mistake in a writer’s room.”
• Colbert has a boat problem. Discussing what he might do after The Late Show, Colbert revealed that he has a boat kit in his basement. “I’m two hours into it, and it’s a 200-hour project,” he said. The project, it turns out, dates back to a 2008 home renovation, when he measured the doors to make sure he could eventually get the boat out. His fellow hosts were not entirely confident he would finish it.

Watch the entire special episode at the top of this post, or listen wherever podcasts are found.