Stephen Colbert's Calming Monologue Is the Zen You Need to Get Through Election Day
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If your Election Night plan is to curl up in your snack blankets, shovel ice cream into your face, and obsessively doomscroll into the wee hours of the morning, you’re not alone—but there’s another way. If you don’t believe us, take it from Stephen Colbert, who has somehow achieved a miraculous state of election zen ahead of the big night.
Describing how he felt about “the most high-stakes election of [his] lifetime” in last night’s episode of The Late Show, Colbert claimed to feel “oddly calm,” saying that he would approach Election Day with “the languid placidity of a blue whale.” How did he locate his mental beach, you ask? Turns out the answer is a little bit of that good old-fashioned que sera, sera attitude: whatever will be, will be.
“I’m the most relaxed I’ve been for months, because at 11:38 the night before the election, what are you going to do?” Colbert said. “I think everyone has made up their mind.”
Colbert went on to riff on space films like Apollo 13 and Gravity, weaving a complicated interstellar analogy about his resignation to the nation’s fate, whatever it may be.
“Isaac Newton is in the driver’s seat now,” Colbert said. “We are in the grip of the gravitational forces of democracy, which are pulling us toward the results. It’s like our country is a deep space object falling toward a black hole. Either we’re going to get sucked over the event horizon into a well of corruption that not even votes can escape from, or we’ll use this gravity well to slingshot, pick up speed, and go off in an entirely new direction. Maybe that planet where Baby Yoda lives.”
Maybe the zen stems from happy thoughts of snuggling Baby Yoda—or maybe it’s Drincodin. In a spoof advertisement, Colbert promoted a product called Election-Strength Drincodin. It’s a surefire way to liberate yourself from election anxiety, according to the announcer: “If you can’t rest until every vote is counted, Drincodin’s time-release formula will release you from time, entering your body in a medically-induced coma.”
But whether your Election Night plan involves the likes of Drincodin or not, the day is finally here—“the day we’ve all been hope-dreading while laugh-screaming at our doomscrolling,” as Colbert puts it. It’s a momentous day, one that will decide the fate of the American project, but as in any good space movie, all we have to do is land this hurtling hunk of space junk on solid ground.
“This is a test of the strength of American voters—but also the institutions we have built,” Colbert said. “This president has exposed a lot of weaknesses in our government, but it just has to hold together for one last run.”
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