Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS
At this point, there may wind up being a whole album’s worth of songs performed for Stephen Colbert during this final stretch of CBS’ The Late Show.
Weeks after guest Jimmy Fallon serenaded Colbert with a rendition of My Way (modified to include nods to The Colbert Report, President Trump wanting Colbert off the air, and other in-jokes), three-time Tony Award winner Nathan Lane served up a show tune for the Late Show host.
“This is my final appearance on The Late Show—unless George Clooney falls out and I get a last-minute call,” Lane explained, “so I wanted to do something special. For your audience, and also to thank you for being such a kind and gracious host.”
Accompanied by Grammy and Tony winner Marc Shaiman on piano, Lane performed “Laughing Matters,” a thematically apt song from from the 1996 Off-Broadway revue When Pigs Fly. Like Fallon’s massaging of “My Way,” Lane ever-so-slightly tweaked his tune’s opening line, swapping out “Live at Five” for “MS NOW.”
“MS NOW and CNN keep us all abreast… of breaking stories that can tend….to make us anxious and depressed,” he sang.
The song’s ultimate message was how amid an ongoing onslaught of worrisome headlines, it’s vital to “keep your humor, please,” Lane sang. “‘Cause don’t you know it’s time like these… that laughing matters most of all.”
Watch his full performance below.
As alluded to above, Lane’s performance was but the latest of several ways Late Show guests have been honoring Colbert during his CBS talker’s final months. The night after Fallon’s March 6 serenade, John Lithgow read a poem he wrote, titled “The Mighty Colbert,” which doubled as both tribute and elegy for the host, whose show will end its run May 21.
Similarly, Edward Norton at Colbert’s request recently read a four-minute excerpt from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a poem by their shared favorite, Walt Whitman. And just this week, John Mulaney gifted the soon-to-be-unemployed Colbert with cold, hard cash (OK, a $750 check), with which to buy a new suit for job interviews.
