Stephen Colbert told Conan O’Brien a heartwarming story about his late father involving Holy Cross
Both Colbert and O'Brien's fathers have a lot in common with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uka-cQIS48
Conan O’Brien and Stephen Colbert were guests on each other’s shows Tuesday night, making for a hilarious episode of TV in which neither comedian was willing to give up their host duties without a fight.
The duo have plenty of history: Colbert applied for a writing job on O’Brien’s NBC show way back in 1993. But as it turns out, the pair also have a lot in common besides both hosting late-night shows, as they discovered during Tuesday’s episode.
Both Colbert and O’Brien’s dads graduated from Holy Cross, and ended up in the same line of work. O’Brien, a Brookline native and Harvard grad who said that half of his family attended Holy Cross, said his dad worked as a microbiologist specializing in infectious diseases. Colbert’s father, meanwhile, was as an associate director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.
Colbert joked that his father was “basically Anthony Fauci,” as Dr. Fauci, the current director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health, also graduated from Holy Cross.
Colbert also shared a heartwarming story about his father, who died in a plane crash in 1974 along with two of Colbert’s brothers.
Early in Colbert’s career when he was working on “The Daily Show,” he was filming a segment in a gated community in Arizona. There, he randomly started talking to an elderly man watching the filming named “Bones” Hamilton.
“At some point he mentioned he went to Holy Cross, and I said, ‘What year did you graduate?’ And he goes, ‘1942,’” Colbert said. “And I said, “Did you know Jim Colbert?’ And he goes, ‘Oh he was my floormate! I went to the senior dance [and] double dated with him and his girlfriend.'”
“I said, ‘That’s my mom!'” Colbert finished.
At that point, Hamilton asked Colbert if he had ever seen his father’s college yearbook, and invited the comedian inside. According to Colbert, because Hamilton knew what had happened to his father, he left Colbert with a parting gift.
“He pulls out the Holy Cross yearbook from 1942, takes out an X-Acto knife, and cuts out my father’s page,” Colbert said. “It’s a full page of what people had to say about him and stuff like that, and handed it to me. And it’s on my office wall right now.”
You can watch O’Brien’s version of the full interview below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfI2UnpjNU4
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