Stephen Colbert
speaker
1,477 appearances
50 recordings
16 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 4 Sep
Stephen Colbert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 31 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 18.
Appearances
And so that's what I read. I read a lot of books. I knew that he had lived a life of the mind, so that's what I wanted to do. It was important to be smart. My father was a dean, an assistant dean at Yale Medical when he was 29. He was a full dean at 31. at St. Louis. And so he was this academic superstar, which I never was, but he was this academic superstar and a deep thinker.
And I aspired for that in hopes of knowing him. And often it was religiously based. He was Jesuit educated and my mother and my father both profoundly dedicated to their Catholic faith in different ways. My father more intellectually and my mother more sort of mystically in a way, though she also read a great deal, but more Dorothy Day.
And I think I was most influenced by the little bit I knew that I used as a thread to pull on to try to understand him. Yeah.
This is the God machine.
Sure. Conan was there. Jimmy Fallon was there. Chris Rock was there.
Well, first, if I could just back up just slightly here, I'm willing to talk about my own faith if my guest asks me about it. I don't like to proselytize. And I'll make any jokes about the Catholic Church. You know, I don't – they deserve a lot of them. And I am deeply Catholic in that it is combed into my being, but I don't know how deeply devout I am.
I know people who are really deeply devout and I wouldn't want to – I just don't want to confuse myself with someone who is a very devoted Catholic, a devout, I mean. But I have become friends with Father Jim Martin over the years, who's sort of like the Broadway priest in New York. And he's the editor of America Magazine. And he was the chaplain of the Colbert Report on the old show.
And, you know, we've become dear friends over the years. And he just wrote me one day. I actually got the email right before I went on stage at the Late Show one night saying, hey, the Vatican has asked me to put together a list of like 20 comedians because the pope wants to meet with some comedians. Would you mind helping with that? And I was like, yeah, sure. Sure.
So I put a list together of 40 comedians. They sent me back a list of 15 or 20, something like that. Like they'd made their selects of my selects and with a few of their own. And Jim Gaffigan and I called everybody on the list and we said, hey, we don't really know what this is about, but the Pope wants to meet comedians.
because he thinks that comedians do something valuable in society and he just wants to meet us. Now, I thought we were going to go to Rome and like hang with the Pope. I don't know why I thought that. I thought that maybe we'd like sit there and we'd have coffee or tea with the Pope and he would ask us some questions, then we would get a photo and leave.
It turns out that these were comedians from all over the world. It was like from 60 countries. And the pope had a meeting in the Apostolic Palace with us. There was – I think altogether it was like 110 comedians. And we all didn't know what was going on. And we all sat there and the pope came in and he gave –
A beautiful speech about comedy that we did not understand at all, that we read later, that was about how – Because it was in Italian? It was in solamente in italiano. And it was about how comedy, I think, eases people's day. And it is like the social lubricant.
And it's okay to make fun of God and the church and the pope and all that kind of stuff as long as, like, you do it with a smile and there's some intention to make people feel better. And what struck me was – It's like your philosophy.
Yeah, I would like to think so. And what struck me is that we're in this room, which is about the size of the Sistine Chapel. And it's actually down the hall from the Sistine Chapel. And it's more Rococo than it is, you know, late Renaissance. But it's beautiful. It's like you're in another Sistine Chapel. And we're all sitting there in our Sunday best, as it were, waiting for the pope to come in.
But comedians are all iconoclasts. We're all people who have a pretty jaundiced view of authority. And I know that some of the people there weren't Catholic or weren't meaningfully Catholic, at least by their own description, anymore. And the minute the pope came in, we all leapt to our feet. Like, the iconoclasm went out the door.
We all just leapt to our feet and started applauding and, like, screaming. I thought, wow. That's the effect the Pope has on 110 comedians. Like it was it was it was almost like an autonomic response because you've spent all this. It's like the location. It's the it's the red shoes. It's the white outfit. It's all the it's all like the guys with the sashes around you.
The Pope's gentlemen who all look like butlers and everything. We were all I was sort of shocked that we we all kind of gave into it immediately. Yeah.
I did. I did. I memorized something in Italian. I went up and I said, you know, Sancte Padre, you know, Holy Father, my name is Stephen Colbert, and I am the reciting – I'm the voce recitante. I'm the reciting voice for your memoir, Life, because he had released a memoir of his life in the spring.
And I had gotten a call from my manager to say, baby doll, you're not going to believe who wants you to do their audio book. Right. And I'm like, who? And he goes, just guess. I'm like, I don't know. Barbra Streisand. No. And he goes, the f***ing Pope. And I go, does it pay? And he goes, you better believe. So anyway, so he negotiates with the Vatican for my contract. And I read the Pope.
So I just said, I read your book. You know, I thank so much. I was reciting voice for your book. And he said, ah, I kind of used his hand to guide me to the side. So that was it. That's all I got. It wasn't that. It was very nice. And he gave me a rosary. We all got rosaries blessed by the Pope.
Showing 1441–1460 of 1,477 · page 73 of 74
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