Stephen Colbert reunited with buddy Jon Stewart on Tuesday night’s episode of The Late Show and the two quickly reignited their dewy-eyed mutual admiration society while spraying venom at the Trump administration as “putrid.”
Variety notes in the opening moments of the segment, Colbert reminisced about his early days on Comedy Central, and he presented Stewart with a 27-year-old photo of them together behind the Daily Show desk.
“One of us has not aged as well as the other,” Stewart joked, in a seemingly self-deprecating jab at himself. “This looks like a double-blind study where they gave one of these people is getting age-defying peptides and the other one is getting a placebo.”
Stewart then shared some advice he got from David Letterman at the tail end of his inglorious late-night effort, The Jon Stewart Show, which stumbled from 1993 to 1995 on MTV.
“He said, ‘Don’t confuse cancellation with failure.’ I thought that was profound,” Stewart recalled, before adding. “But then he said, ‘But in this case it is also a failure.’”
Stewart shared his dream of a world without President Donald Trump and exhorted the audience to follow his cue.
“Oh people, close your eyes and dream. The day that the electorate in this great nation we call home repudiates this putrid administration,” Stewart gushed.
“The day that that happens, my brother, my brother, there will be — and I mean this — the day that that happens, there will be a joyful noise from the bowels of this great country that will make Hungary’s repudiation of Orban look like an Amish Sabbath. We are tired. We are tired.”
“The ubiquitous bloviating of the commander-in-chief has put us all as defined as who we are in opposition to him,” Stewart later declared. “And it’s just a ridiculous framing. It’s a minute portion of the joy machine that you call your show. And it it’s annoying.”
Earlier Stewart prefaced his comments on Trump by saying, “”the only saving grace that I think that I have is that I don’t think Trump has cable. I think it’s a network thing.”
Well, he can only live in hope.
Colbert now has just two episodes of The Late Show remaining.