Still reeling from news of The Late Show‘s unexpected cancellation, Stephen Colbert called on Weird Al Yankovic and Lin-Manuel Miranda to lift audience spirits on Monday evening. As everyone knows, the best way to distract from your own sudden misfortune is to laugh at someone else’s. Fittingly, Yankovic and Miranda pulled together a parody of the viral Coldplay Cheating Camera with some help from Colbert’s late-night peers.
Yankovic and Miranda debuted their rendition of the Coldplay classic “Viva La Vida,” which was part of the joke itself. “I can’t think of anything funnier than Coldplay,” Yankovic quipped. But the audience carried the rest of the performance. The Late Night camera panned over to Anderson Cooper in the crowd, so distracted by his phone that Andy Cohen grabbing his face for a kiss caught him completely off-guard. Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers were ready when it landed on them, though they couldn’t quite get their high-fives to connect.
Happy Gilmore‘s Christopher McDonald and Adam Sandler watched the night unfold with two baskets of popcorn shrimp that they split with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Even John Oliver, with Jon Stewart, put on a show, with Stewart leaping out of his seat and Oliver flipping the camera off. Everyone seemed to be having a great time — well, everyone other than the animated rendering of Donald Trump that released the Paramount logo from its grip and ducked out of the frame faster than a CEO caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert, or however that old saying goes.
“Uh oh, either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” Yankovic said. Soon enough, the fun was over. “Stop playing, I’m sorry,” Colbert interrupted. “I just got this note from corporate. Your song has been cancelled. It says here this a purely financial decision. It says here that since you started playing that song the network has lost — and I don’t know how this is possible — $40 to $50 million.”
Colbert really has nothing left to lose by sending jabs towards CBS and its parent company, Paramount, which is currently attempting to merge with Skydance Media in a deal that has been delayed for over a year while the companies await FCC approval. They already fired him — effective in 10 months — three days after he called out Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump. Colbert said that it took the weekend for the cancellation to feel real.
“It sunk in that they’re killing off our show,” he said. “But they made one mistake. They left me alive.”
From Rolling Stone US
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