As the host of CBS's The Late Show with Stephen Colbert takes the mantra "the show must go on" very seriously. Maybe that's why, in December 2023, he insisted on taping two back-to-back shows, even though he was in excruciating pain.
"Between acts of the show, I would burst into tears because I was in so much pain," he says. "It felt like somebody was leaning on a broomstick and jamming the end of the broomstick into my gut."
Stephen's wife, Evie McGee Colbert, who was at home in New Jersey, knew something was seriously wrong. Stephen wanted to come home after the taping and sleep it off, but Evie had a different plan.
"I bypassed Stephen completely and called [his driver] Pablo and said … 'Don't even tell him where you're going. Just go to the emergency room. I'll meet you there. He's out of the picture now. He has no voice,'" Evie says.
At the hospital, Stephen was diagnosed with appendicitis. Surgery the next morning revealed that his appendix had burst, leading to blood poisoning and sepsis.
Looking back now, Stephen concedes that Evie's insistence on going to the hospital "kind of" saved his life, while Evie has a different take: "Or Stephen was foolish enough to risk his life. We could look at it that way, too."
Stephen and Evie, who married in 1993, share South Carolina roots. In addition to being partners in marriage, they work together on their production company, Spartina Productions, and Evie makes regular appearances on The Late Show. Now they've collaborated on a new cookbook, Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves. Each recipe in the book is preceded by the story behind it and memories associated with it.
Interview highlights
On cooking
Stephen: It's relaxing for me. That's what I want to do on a Saturday afternoon if I've got a moment and I've got it to myself, especially if there's a farmer's market in town or something like that. ... What drives Evie crazy sometimes is that then I don't eat it.
Evie: You're not cooking to make food for yourself. You're just cooking to make a process.
Stephen: I love process. I love one thing becoming another thing. Well, it's kind of like doing the show. You get there in the morning and there's maybe nine stories that are generally dominating the conversation over the last 24 hours. We have good pitches on six of them and three of them then dominate the monologue because we've boiled it all down. That's why I like the show Chopped, because ... you have these baskets [at] the beginning of the show where there's, like, octopus and licorice and smoked salt ... [and you have to] make an entrée or whatever. That's what doing the show is like. And you have to love process to do a show on a daily basis, and that's related to food for me. One thing becomes another thing with a little care, a little love and a little imagination. And I find it incredibly soothing to me. And then I just try to give the food away.
On their favorite recipes
Evie: My favorite recipe in the book is the one that we start with: my mother's cheese biscuits, because those were things that she made, always. And so now when I make them, I feel like she's with me and it's comforting. And I love them. They're wonderful to give and they're delicious and fattening. I think comfort food should be fattening.
Stephen: I got so many in there, it's probably the red rice. Growing up on the coast of South Carolina, just anywhere in the South, there's so much red rice and it has its roots in jollof rice of West Africa. But it's super jammy and a little spicy and salty. And I had it almost every day growing up … and I never got tired of it. And right before this book, I actually found a way to make it based on an Alison Roman recipe [that had the same] flavor I remembered as a child from this red rice. And I tried [the recipe] and it worked. And that was that discovery of being able to get that flavor back from my childhood, those carefree years is what that rice gives me.
Evie: I think we both enjoyed that rediscovery of recipes that we'd grown up with.
On the admiration they have for their fathers
Stephen: When your parent dies when you're young, they become Olympian, something much larger than life, which, of course, is how a child sees their parent, but you never get to move beyond that. So as you get older ... my father inflated ahead of me and became even grander in a way. And so if there was any standard placed on me, it was placed on me by myself.
Evie: I was lucky enough to have had my father for a long time. He just passed away this past April. And at his funeral, when I delivered the eulogy, I mentioned how as a little girl I used to like to put my feet in my father's footprints on the sand. And I think metaphorically, that's how I felt about him. I admired my father so much that I always wanted to try to live up to be the person he was.
On how The Late Show is holding on in a changing TV landscape
Stephen: What I do is a little odd. And the shows that I've been involved in [are] a little bit outside of the normal tidal shifts of the rest of the industry. … Over the last 25 years, I've done three projects, essentially: I've worked on The Daily Show, I've done The Colbert Report, I've done The Late Show. And there've been a few side things, but those have been my career over the last 25 years. … And those kinds of shows still flourish, generally speaking, relative to the rest of the industry — live, same-day. And I'm not saying viewership hasn't gone down for TV, but things like sports, news and late-night shows, which are kind of dependent upon watching it that day — because they're like unrefrigerated shrimp — they're no good tomorrow. So they still have an appointment audience on a daily basis.
On Stephen being Catholic and Evie being Presbyterian
Evie: I was nervous about Stephen's mother because of all 11 children I'm the only spouse who did not convert to Catholicism. But you're the baby. And I think she let you get away with it.
Stephen: Also I didn't ask you to.
Evie: You didn't ask.
Stephen: I told my mom the night before that I was gonna ask Evie to marry me the next day, and I said, "And I'm not going to ask her to convert." And she looked at me for a while and she goes, "I think your dad would be OK with that." Which was a big thing for her to say.
Monique Nazareth and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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