Stephen Colbert’s former Late Show staffers are returning to late-night.
Months after Paramount axed Colbert’s show, Late Show writers Ariel Dumas and Asher Perlman have found homes on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, according to LateNighter.
Dumas, the show’s head writer, led the team of fired writers when Emmy host Mariska Hargitay hired them to write for this year’s awards show. She worked for Colbert on The Colbert Report and followed the host when he took over The Late Show from David Letterman on CBS in 2015.
Perlman, a contributing cartoonist for The New Yorker, joined The Late Show staff in 2019, following his tenure on Comedy Central’s The Opposition with Jordan Klepper. He hosts the Jokes on News podcast with his former Late Show colleagues Steve Waltien, Eliana Kwartler, Michael Cruz and Kayne.
Both Dumas and Perlman made on-camera appearances on The Late Show before the show aired its last episode on May 21.
The show’s cancellation came after years of back-and-forth with Donald Trump, and Colbert’s declaring on air that his network’s parent company, Paramount, “bribed” the president with its $16.6 million payout to settle his lawsuit over Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview.
Paramount needed approval from Trump’s administration to merge with Skydance at the time, but the network declared that axing Colbert and The Late Show franchise were “purely financial” decisions.
Colbert’s former staff have been defiant, accusing the company of leaving them in the lurch for Emmy nominations, though the team ultimately won Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series and Outstanding Variety Series for The Late Show’s last season.
LateNighter reports that Dumas has been hired as The Tonight Show’s sketch writing supervisor. She told Vanity Fair that the job started just days after the Emmys. As for how it’s going, she told the publication, “I’m only on day three, so at this point, I’m just still trying to remember which floor the cafeteria is on.”
Both comedians are stepping into markedly different territory from Colbert’s fiery anti-Trump show as they join Fallon’s team. When Jimmy Kimmel was suspended from ABC after angering MAGA, following threats from Trump’s FCC, Fallon told CNBC he was “keeping his head down.”
“Our show’s never really been that political,” he said last September. “We hit both sides equally, and we try to make everybody laugh.”
