Stephen Colbert returned to The Late Show on Monday (December 11th), after being hospitalized recently for a ruptured appendix.
“It’s so lovely to see all of you,” he told his audience. “The last time I was sitting at this desk, which was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I was in a heap of trouble. I was not aware of the amount of trouble I was in.” Band leader Louis Cato chimed in to say, “For the first time in almost nine years, you had to rehearse the monologue witting at the desk with a barf bucket next to you.”
“The pain was manageable,” Colbert quipped. “It only hurt when I moved and when I didn’t.” To further illustrate what his ruptured appendix felt like, he showed a clip from Alien during which the creature bursts through John Hurt’s torso.
While he was at the hospital, the Strangers with Candy actor said, “They said when they opened me up, it was like they’d shot John Wick 5 down there … They don’t know why appendix goes bad because they don’t know why they go good. They have no idea what it does. All they know is at some point it just turns around to the pancreas and says, ‘I bet I could kill this guy.’”
