Last night on the Colbert Report, Jimmy Fallon stopped by to pit his new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor against Colbert’s. And then Stewart came by to back up Colbert, naturally. It was all part of one of the weirdest and most surreal episodes of the show in recent memory.
After spending a perfunctory three minutes or so on desk bits, Fallon came out, followed by Stewart. It was pretty great! But then, after the commercial break, where one would expect the show to return to some sort of normalcy, they upped the craziness. Fallon and Colbert ended up singing a song about ice cream in front of a green screen, complete with the actual Ben and Jerry commenting from a cloud above their heads. And when Colbert moved on to the interview, he did it in front of a green screen that made it look like they were both sitting in front of gigantic flowers.
It was actually pretty fun to see them willing to go so far from the traditional format of the show. At this point, the Colbert character has gone way beyond merely being a Bill O’Reilly parody, so they don’t need to be married to the Fox News format all the time. Has any anchor on Fox News ever participated in an ice cream hallucination singalong? No, but who cares? At this point, they’ve earned the right to get balls-out crazy sometimes.