Culture
Colbert Wins Two Emmys and Still Can't Say No to Jimmy Kimmel With a Razor
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
Stephen Colbert, freshly armed with two Emmy Awards and a deal to write a new Lord of the Rings movie, appeared Monday on Jimmy Kimmel Live in what was billed as a victory lap and concluded, before the second commercial break, as a live shaving demonstration.
Colbert had been cancelled from The Late Show in April after CBS decided that whatever he was doing at 11:35 was no longer worth the budget required to do it. He took the news with the specific grace of a man who had already won, which is to say he immediately won two Emmys and signed on to write a screenplay set in Middle-earth, a franchise that has now absorbed everyone who has ever been publicly humiliated and needs something large to do about it.
He arrived at Kimmel's studio in what sources present described as a full beard, which is the kind of facial hair a man grows when he no longer has to sit across from a network executive and pretend to find their notes helpful.
"I think the beard is a statement," Colbert told Kimmel, pausing. "I'm not entirely sure what it's stating. Something about freedom. Or possibly about not owning a good mirror."
Kimmel, who has spent twenty-two years on that stage and has the instincts of a man who knows exactly when another man's dignity is briefly unattended, produced a razor approximately four minutes into the interview. The audience responded with the kind of noise that means everyone understood what was about to happen except possibly Colbert, who laughed in the way people laugh when they are hoping that laughing will make the thing stop.
It did not stop.
Colbert cited his Lord of the Rings assignment as proof that losing a late-night show is essentially a fellowship quest in reverse: you start in the Shire of network television, suffer a great darkness, and emerge in the New Line Cinema development offices holding something that might be magical or might be a first draft. "Tolkien wrote about a world where a small person can do enormous things if everyone around him believes it," Colbert said. "I think that's beautiful. I think that applies here. I think Jimmy should put the razor down."
Jimmy did not put the razor down.
The beard came off in stages, which is the most cinematic way a beard can be removed and also the least dignified, because each stage leaves a man looking like a different, increasingly confused person. By the third stage Colbert was wearing the expression of someone who has won two Emmys in the last seventy-two hours and is now trying to remember why that felt like it mattered.
Peter Jackson, when reached for comment on the Lord of the Rings screenplay, said through a representative that he was "excited for new voices to bring fresh perspectives to a story that belongs to everyone," which is what you say when someone else is writing the thing and you want to be diplomatic about it in a way that leaves room to be less diplomatic later.
Colbert, post-shave, said he felt "lighter." This is what men say. It means nothing. The beard is gone and the Emmys are real and the screenplay is being written by a man who now looks exactly like he did in 2014, which is either a beginning or a very well-funded way of going backwards.
The razor has since been returned to Kimmel's desk drawer, where it waits.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/jimmy-kimmel-stephen-colbert-beard-emmys-lord-of-the-rings-1235627508/