Rest in peace, The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert’s pretend conservative pundit was so close to the real thing that at times we tended to forget it was all satire. Twitter certainly seemed to forget pretty often. But after almost ten years, the joke is almost over.

Stephen Colbert
Will we finally see the real face of Stephen Colbert?

Colbert will host his final show on Comedy Central, before taking over The Late Show from David Letterman. It was a good run, a character that started a life of its own, after being modelled on a real, but equally outrageous public figure – Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. In fact, O’Reilly was keenly aware that the joke was on him – and he did NOT appreciated. The Fox News Channel icon once joked that the next book in his Killing series would be Killing Colbert. He is yet to fulfil that threat, though, while Colbert is steadily moving up.

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We still have a few weeks to go until Colbert takes over The Late Show this coming spring. But if his career so far is anything to go by, we’re in for a lot of acerbic, dry wit, plenty of very confused guests and maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally get a glimpse of the man behind the curtain. Keep in mind that during the entirety of the Colbert Report, we’ve never actually seen Colbert drop the character. We know his alter ego is hilarious, but how is his real (well, more real) personality going to jive with the Tonight Show audience? Only time will tell. For now, all we can say is – Colbert is dead, long live Colbert!