Stephen Colbert hard at work writing his Lord Of The Rings movie, says Stephen Colbert

Indeed, Colbert’s curt response to a Lord Of The Rings status update recalls a tense evening with the Inklings, when scholar Nevill Coghill nudged a busy, clearly very sleepy J.R.R. Tolkien for any new info about The Lord Of The Rings so he could publish it in his fanzine (or 1939 English equivalent). “Literally, I woke up in New Zealand yesterday. I flew here for the Emmys,” Colbert said. “Yesterday, [when I was in] New Zealand [it was] tomorrow there. I went from yesterday to tomorrow, so I don’t know how many days today has been. What did I say in my speech? I was hallucinating up there.” 

Colbert later got his bearings in a post-win interview with CNN’s Elizabeth Wagmeister and Variety’s Ramin Setoodeh, where he assured everyone that, despite The Late Show‘s untimely finale in May, free speech remains as spritely as ever—like, say, a Hobbit after a post-meal toke of pipe-weed. He went on to praise his remaining late-night fraternity, saying, “I think that late night is just as funny and just as vital as it ever has been, and I love watching Jimmy and Jimmy and John and John and Seth and everybody else. And I think I hope it goes on for a long time because you get to work with people like this, and that’s the greatest gift.”