Stephen Colbert gave a poetic speech after The Late Show won the top late-night Emmy, two months after being canceled.

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert won the Emmy for Outstanding Talk Series, beating The Daily Show, which has won the award for the last two years, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. It marks the CBS’ show’s first ever win in the main late-night category, a category that had been dominated by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver since Colbert took over the franchise from David Letterman.

Colbert took the high-road, starting his speech by thanking CBS.

“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,” he said.

“Ten years ago, in September of 2015, Spike Jonze stopped by my office and said, ‘What do you want this show to be about? I said, ‘Ah, Spike, I don’t know how you could do it, but I kind of want to do a a late-night comedy show that was about love. 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,” he added.

“Ten years later, in September of 2025, I have never loved my country more desperately. God bless America. Stay strong. Be brave and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor,” he concluded.

It marks The Late Show’s second Emmy of the year after Jim Hoskinson won the award for Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys.

That award was The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s first ever Emmy, despite having 33 nominations.

Colbert himself is no stranger to the gold statuette, having picked up the award for Outstanding Variety Series (the category’s former name) twice in 2013 and 2014 for his Comedy Central series The Colbert Report.

The show was the favorite to pick up this year’s award ever since it was unceremoniously canceled by CBS in July. The TV Academy voters clearly love the victim narrative and they also love a talk show host willing to mock their own network. For instance, The Late Show with David Letterman won the award five straight years between 1998 and 2002.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was axed in July, days after the comedian called Paramount Global’s $16M settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit a “big fat bribe.”

This came ahead of the closure of David Ellison’s Skydance Media’s deal to acquire the company, which had been mired in politics thanks to President Trump.

CBS said that the move was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” and was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount”.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026 so this year’s award is not its last opportunity to win an Emmy; the show will undoubtedly be in the running to win the award next year with its final run of shows.