It was 2005 on The Late Show Tuesday night, and Stephen Colbert was reliving his last day on The Daily Show, packing up his mug, tangerine iBook, and other era-appropriate props. One by one, former costars Samantha Bee, Rob Corddry, Ed Helms, John Oliver (playing Steve Carrell, because 2005), and Jon Stewart appeared to make anachronistic jokes. "I can't believe you're leaving in the middle of the George W. Bush administration," Bee said. "There's never gonna be another president this good for comedy — I mean, this guy does something ridiculous, like, at least once a month. I know one thing for sure: There is no scenario in which I will ever say, 'God, I wish George W. Bush was president!'"
Stewart ended on a yogurt-infused sitcom-father speech, to cap off the nostalgia.
Colbert sat down with Stewart for a chat that ranged from Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey to Fox News and the FCC's investigation into what Stewart jokingly referred to as Colbert's "potty mouth." Stewart said he wasn't really surprised that Bill O'Reilly kept his job at Fox News for so long. "The place was being run by a guy who was doing the same thing," Roger Ailes, Stewart pointed out. "How could you call in someone who works for you and say, 'This sexual harassment stuff, and the money we're paying out, it's got to stop,' when you're paying out money for sexual harassment?"
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He ended with a classic Jon Stewart moment on Colbert's fellatio joke about Trump and Russia. "The things that you say, even if they're crass, or even if they, in some ways, are not respectful enough to the office of the presidency, we can insult, he can injure," he said. "It's the difference between insult and injury, and I, for the life of me, I do not understand why, in this country, we try and hold comedians to a standard we do not hold leaders to. It's bizarre."
Then the gang got back together for a View-like walk down memory lane, with clips of the early Daily Show reports, including a harrowing tale Colbert told about escaping the Ku Klux Klan at a cross-burning.
Bee almost topped that with a story about a Florida politician who said homosexuality made him nauseated but then started planning a threesome, and Colbert closed things out with Stewart interviewing him as Rev. Al Sharpton in 2001. Peter Weber
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