Tuesday night might have made late-night history. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon opened The Late Show and The Tonight Show using the same cold open, which also guest starred Conan O’Brien, whose own program on TBS is on hiatus this week.
The clip finds Colbert typing his monologue for the night when he receives a call from Fallon. “Hey, Lowlife,” Fallon says as Colbert answers. The comedian’s response? “Hey, Lost Soul.” They’ve borrowed those nicknames from Donald Trump’s speech in South Carolina Monday night, where the president continued his anti-late night tirade—a feud he first ignited earlier this week, when he slammed Fallon for saying that he regrets mussing Trump’s hair on air in 2016.
In the clip, Colbert and Fallon chat about the president’s comments before calling O’Brien to join the party. (Since he’s on hiatus, the bit depicts the Conan host in the middle of shaving his beard and chest.) After the three hang up, the version of the video shown on CBS ends with Colbert running out on stage, as he always does. But this time, he’s announced not as “Stephen Colbert,” but as “That Guy from CBS”—another homage to the president’s speech, in which he refused to name the comedian with whom he’s battled most intensely by name.
This might be the first time in late-night history that two shows have used the same cold open. When reached for comment by Variety, O’Brien explained briefly how the bit came together: “Colbert reached out to me this morning. I have since had my number changed.”
Back when Late Show launched with host Dave Letterman, such a collaboration would have been unthinkable. Letterman and former Tonight Show host Jay Leno were famously fierce rivals for decades years, thanks to their battle to take over Tonight from Johnny Carson. Over the years, the late-night landscape has evolved, and hosts have become less overtly hostile to one another. Perhaps the first step in the direction of cooperation came about a decade ago, during the 2007-2008 W.G.A. writers’ strike. At the time, Colbert, O’Brien—then host of NBC’s Late Night—and Jon Stewart staged a feud over who was responsible for making Mike Huckabee famous, which ended with a final brawl on O’Brien’s show.
In recent years, collaboration across late-night’s growing bevy of shows has only increased, despite the continued ratings feud between Fallon and Colbert; even hosts whose time slots compete can be seen appearing on one another’s shows occasinoally. Each late-night host has his or her own way of dealing with this administration, and as we’ve seen, some methods resonate more than others. But this point, about halfway to 2020, it appears late night is above all united by the shared pressure of being forced to turn one of the country’s most harrowing administrations into comedy—and as Colbert, Fallon, and O’Brien have proven, there’s strength in numbers.
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