Stephen Colbert accepts Emmy as crowd chants his name

“Thank you for this honor. I want to thank CBS for giving us the privilege to be part of the late night tradition, which I hope continues long after we’re no longer doing this show,” Colbert began his speech. He went on to give another shout out to the entire crew on his show whom, earlier in the evening, he’d encouraged others to hire. He also thanked his wife (“the real brains of the outfit”) and children, as well as his longtime executive assistant Amy Cole, who died of cancer the year before. 

“In September of 2015, Spike Jonze stopped by my office and said, ‘Hey, what do you want this show to be about?’ And I said, ‘Ah, Spike, I don’t know how you could do it, but I’d kinda like to do a late night show, a late night comedy show, that was about love,'” Colbert continued his speech. “And I don’t know if I ever figured that out, but at a certain point—and you can guess what that point was—I realized that in some ways we were doing a late night comedy show about loss. And that’s related to love, because sometimes you only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it. Ten years later in September of 2025, my friends, I have never loved my country more desperately. God bless America!”

The victory ended with a long group hug for the whole Late Show gang. But before that, Colbert concluded his speech with a rousing call to action: “Stay strong, be brave, and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor!”