Stephen Colbert turned up the day after his last-ever Late Show to guest host Only in Monroe, a public access program in Monroe, Michigan, and spent an hour turning local television into a one-night comedy set. He said it had been an “excruciating 23 hours” without being on TV, then added at the outset that he had not slept since 2015.
The hour was built like a loving prank. Colbert joked about local weed dispensaries, Monroe’s version of Comic Con and a feud between two hot dog businesses, then sat down with Jeff Daniels and watched Steve Buscemi read an ad for Buscemi Pizza. “I’ve got nothing to do with it,” Buscemi said. The show also gave Jack White time to serve as Colbert’s volunteer musical director, hunched over a reel-to-reel tape deck with headphones clamped over his ears while Colbert asked, “We don’t have any sponsors? We actually lost a lot of money making this show tonight?” and later deadpanned, “Now I know how CBS felt.”
Colbert said he was grateful to be on Monroe Community Media before it, too, was acquired by Paramount, a line that landed because the joke was rooted in a real shift in the media landscape. Only in Monroe is a local public access show, and Colbert had already guest-hosted it once before, in 2015. This time, the program stretched far beyond a cameo. He led the crew through the town’s oddball corners, sampled Monroe-style hot dogs with White — “Lady and the Tramp-style,” White said — and later performed a helium-addled version of The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love With a Girl.”
The tension came from how thoroughly Colbert understood the format he was mocking and celebrating at the same time. The show kept slipping between parody and sincerity, from the local business jokes to the birthday sendoff he gave creative director Genevieve Benson at the end, when he handed her a ham topped with a birthday hat and a lit sparkler. For Colbert, the return answered its own question: after leaving network television, he did not disappear, and Monroe gave him a stage that was smaller, stranger and funnier than the one he had just left.
