On Monday’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert looked back on a brief exchange he once had with the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. “Whether or not you agreed with him, or made a lot of jokes about him like I did, one thing you’ve got to admit is that he had a great sense of humor,” Colbert said. Then he thought way back to when he met Scalia at the White House Correspondents’ dinner almost 10 years ago.
As he gave the speech, Colbert recalled, “not a lot of people laughed in the front row.” When it was over, Colbert said, no one was even making eye contact with him. “The one exception was Antonin Scalia.” At one point in his speech, Colbert had bitten his thumb at Scalia, in reference to the chin-brushing gesture Scalia himself had been caught making to photographers. Scalia was a good sport about it—he laughed during the speech, and even caught up with Colbert afterward to laugh about it some more. Colbert’s one thought as he walked away? “Don’t you make me love you, old man.”
