Stephen Colbert knows how to draw the comedic potential out of reporters. In short promos for The Late Show, Colbert’s brought out Ted Koppel’s best deadpan with a video of fake news stories, and he sent Slate’s own John Dickerson on a whimsical road trip with Abraham Lincoln. This week, Colbert and his writers gave CNN’s Christiane Amanpour a chance to land a few punch lines in an even longer bit—a charming investigation into the working conditions of the Late Show offices.
Amanpour’s report, which starts around 1:06 in the video above, documents the first-world problems of late-night writers and designers using the tone and tropes associated with cable-news coverage of international disasters. In the office kitchen, for instance, staffers in search of Cinnamon Toast Crunch find that the only remaining sustenance is a fruit cup, “an apparently healthy snack, but in reality processed peach cubes drowning in heavy syrup, dooming these lost souls to return here hour after hour, trapped in a heartbreaking cycle of sugar crash and sugar craving from which they will never break free.” Colbert himself shows up at the end of the report, generously playing the straight man to Amanpour’s overzealous newshound.
