President Obama will sit down with faux news anchor Stephen Colbert for one of the comedian’s final shows, before he heads to CBS to host “The Late Show.”
“The Colbert Report” is filming a special episode in Washington on Monday as part of its last hurrah. “My show is going to be a star-studded evening, because I am a star and a stud,” Colbert told his audience on Thursday’s show.
{mosads}“The highlight is that I lined up one of my favorite ’90s alternative bands, the Presidents of the United States of America, to play their hit song, ‘Peaches,’” Colbert continued. “Unfortunately, there was a bit of a mix-up, and I did not book the band. I booked the actual president of the United States of America. Barack Obama is going to be my guest, oh yeah!”
“Nation, I cannot overstate how huge this is,” Colbert deadpanned. “The size of the hugeness? Large. I’m so honored to be sitting down with the man who sat down with Bill O’Reilly.”
Colbert’s Comedy Central show is poised to end its run in mid-December. Its host will take the reins for the retiring David Letterman on “The Late Show” next year.
Next week’s Obama interview will be the first — and likely only — time the president will have appeared in-person on Colbert’s show. Obama appeared in a taped segment on the program back in 2009.
In a 2010 Time magazine interview, then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that although Obama was making the late-night television rounds at the time, he was reluctant to have the commander-in-chief appear as Colbert’s guest. “I have yet to see a politician best Stephen Colbert in an interview on his show,” a laughing Gibbs told the mag. “I mean, he’s really, really good.”
Note: This post was updated at 12:22 p.m.