Last night Stephen Colbert premiered The Late Show on CBS, the talk-show staple he took over from David Letterman (who performed his final show in May). Colbert’s guests included Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, George Clooney, and a cursed ancient amulet with a taste for hummus (an ingenious play on Colbert’s requirement to ruthlessly sell products to his new, larger late-night audience.)
Colbert’s tone was predictably a departure from that of the buffoonish conservative zealot he played on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Here, while still a smart goofball, Colbert seemed delighted to shed a decade of playing just one character, and noticeably conscious of taking on a bigger stage, quite literally: The Ed Sullivan theater in Manhattan has been sumptuously renovated and decorated for the occasion.
One of the best segments, in an unpredictable and larger-than-life show jammed with jokes, was when Colbert ripped into everyone’s favorite top-polling, golden-haired, low-hanging comedic fruit—Donald Trump—and satirized the media’s gluttonous obsession with covering him (using another not-so-subtle product placement). Enjoy:
