‘We were lucky’: Stephen Colbert bids emotional farewell in final broadcast on Thursday

Stephen Colbert said in a final goodbye on the series finale of airing on CBS’s The Late Show, concluding a long-journey by thanking his staff, studio audience and viewers for their incredible support.

Colbert stepped onto the stage amidst tumultuous cheering from the studio audience inside the Ed Sullivan Theater.

“If you’re just tuning into “ The Late Show”, you missed a lot,” he said.

When the host noted that Thursday night was the final broadcast and the audience booed, he wagged his finger and said: “ No, no we were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years. You can’t take this for granted.”

Colbert made light of his unresolved outcomes through a joke: “ A lot of people have been asking me what I plan to do after tonight, and the answer is drugs.”

Colbert recalled the way he introduced himself as a blowhard character on Comedy Central’s report in 2025: “ Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news for you.”

Once he moved from Comedy Central to the much bigger CBS stage in 2015, “I realized pretty soon … that our job over here was different,” he said. “We were here to feel the news with you. And I don’t know about you, but I sure have felt it.”

Colbert has said that he hasn’t depended on the exact nuance you see to what he might want to do next. In conversation with People magazine he told: “ I don’t have much better of an answer than most college seniors do, which is I’ve got to finish this first, because it takes almost the entirety of my brain so do this now.”

Colbert told Architectural Digest in a video tour of the theater: “But someone will figure it out, and I wish them all the luck in the world-because they’re gonna love it.”