'Colbert': Burt Reynolds Fades, Johnny Rotten Insults Donald Trump
Fresh from his triumphant Monday night show that featured a cheerfully contentious interview with a Bill Maher who was only too happy to be boorishly condescending — watch the full contretemps here — Stephen Colbert tried to summon up the ghost of Talk Shows Past on Tuesday night’s Late Show with two guests who’d previously made late-night history for very different reasons.
In the 1970s, Burt Reynolds was not just a movie star: 1972’s Deliverance had established both his acting chops and his barrel-chested masculinity; posing nude for Cosmopolitan magazine the same year could have ruined that cred but instead proved his impish sense of humor, a quality that also made him a great talk-show guest. He was prone to poker-faced sarcasm and great hoots of laughter on many appearances with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.
Reynolds was booked on Colbert Tuesday to promote his autobiography But Enough About Me, and he was, alas, a shell of himself. Whereas he used to enter a talk show with a smirking swagger, the 79-year-old Reynolds is now apparently so fragile, he had to be seated in the chair during a commercial before the Colbert interview began. What followed was a polite interview, with Colbert giving Reynolds lots of room to joke, but the Reynolds reflexes in the funny-bone area have faltered. It was an intriguing but fizzling experiment.
Colbert also hosted Public Image Limited, the post-Sex Pistols band John Lydon started up after he left the Pistols and his Johnny Rotten identity behind. It was as the co-leader of PiL with Keith Levine that Lydon gave one of the great rock & roll TV interviews of all time, on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show in 1980 — two segments of sustained surliness that was returned in kind by the host (“Humor me,” sneers Lydon; “Not for long,” shoots back Snyder, cutting to a commercial). I like to bust out this clip whenever I’m given the chance.
Again, alas, Colbert gave Lydon and PiL the opportunity to perform “Double Trouble” from a re-formed, four-piece PiL promoting a new album, What The World Needs Now — but he failed to invite Lydon over to his desk, where the now-plump rocker who reads his lyrics from a music stand might have been able to summon up some of his funny cantankerousness. As it was, we had to be content with one fleeting moment of Lydon insult-hurling, as “Double Trouble” ended and Lydon yelled out a spontaneous final line directed at America: “And don’t you dare vote Donald Trump!”
Somehow I don’t think James Taylor is going to do anything so aggressive when he appears with Colbert tonight.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on CBS.
