Stephen Colbert, born on 13 May 1964, hosted The Colbert Report on Comedy Central from 2005 to 2014 and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS from 2015 to 2026. He has won eleven Primetime Emmy Awards, two Grammys and three Peabody Awards.
Stephen Tyrone Colbert was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of eleven children in a Catholic family. He lived for a few years in Bethesda, Maryland, then grew up on James Island, a suburb of Charleston, South Carolina. His father, James William Colbert Jr., was an immunologist and medical school dean, and his mother, Lorna Elizabeth Colbert (née Tuck), was a homemaker. He has described his parents as devout people who strongly valued intellectualism and taught their children that they could question the Church and still be Catholic.
As a child he noticed that Southerners were often depicted as less intelligent on scripted television, so to avoid the stereotype he taught himself to imitate the speech of American news anchors, particularly John Chancellor. He originally studied to be a dramatic actor but became interested in improvisational theatre at Northwestern University, where he met Second City director Del Close. He first performed professionally at Second City Chicago as an understudy for Steve Carell.
With Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris he developed the sketch series Exit 57, then performed on and wrote for The Dana Carvey Show (1996) and collaborated again with Sedaris and Dinello on the sitcom Strangers with Candy (1999–2000). His work as a correspondent on The Daily Show brought him wide recognition.
In 2005 he left to host The Colbert Report, a parody of personality-driven political opinion shows in which he played a caricatured conservative pundit. In the first episode he introduced the word “truthiness”, which the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster named Word of the Year. His in-character performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner made the series one of Comedy Central’s highest-rated. In 2010 he and Jon Stewart headlined the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, and in 2011 he started the satirical Colbert Super PAC, which was credited with raising awareness of campaign finance issues.
In 2015 CBS hired him to succeed David Letterman as host of The Late Show, which he hosted until 2026. He hosted the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards in September 2017. His book I Am America (And So Can You!) reached No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list in 2007, and Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in 2006 and 2012.
His father became the Medical University of South Carolina’s first vice president of academic affairs in 1969, and his father’s interest in French writers such as Léon Bloy and his mother’s admiration for Catholic Worker leader Dorothy Day shaped the household. He jokingly claims his surname is French, though his ancestry is in fact fifteen-sixteenths Irish.
His mother has described him as “rambunctious” as a child, and many of his ancestors emigrated from Ireland to North America. After more than a decade in the Late Show chair, his run in that role ended in 2026.
Image: Stephen Colbert holding a Peabody Award in 2012 (file photo). Photo: Peabody Awards / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
