“It was so wild to walk out there wearing my headset, which I forgot about, and just hugged all of my old friends,” Dumas recalls to VF. “Then to hav
“It was so wild to walk out there wearing my headset, which I forgot about, and just hugged all of my old friends,” Dumas recalls to VF. “Then to have Stephen shout us out, he’s always been so generous like that. It was such a gift and I really hope it does lead to people getting gigs and their work being recognized, because it’s such a team effort. It’s so surreal to be standing on the stage and see all of your favorite celebrities politely clapping and cheering for you. Like, ‘Thanks, Zendaya.’”
There was no mention of the show’s former network home at CBS in Colbert’s acceptance speech. Last summer, amid the pending merger of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and Skydance Media, the network announced that The Late Show With Stephen Colbert would end after its 2025-2026 season, calling the cancellation “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late-night.” Two months later, Jimmy Kimmel Live was briefly yanked from the air over comments that host Jimmy Kimmel made about the killing of Charlie Kirk. “I was like, ‘What is happening to free speech in this country?’” Dumas recalls of that period. “Because it wasn’t about people not wanting the show anymore. It wasn’t like these shows are going away because no one is watching them. It was a different factor, and I thought that was nuts.”
As she closes her Late Show chapter and lands at another network TV institution, Dumas speaks to Vanity Fair about meeting Taylor Swift, resisting AI, and finding her own industry voice: “I’ve written for other people for so many years that I also would like to spend more time thinking about writing for myself, and what does that look or sound like? It’s so much scarier.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Vanity Fair: You’ve been working with Colbert since The Colbert Report in 2014. How have you grown as a writer since then?
Ariel Dumas: It really felt like going to grad school for this work. The importance he placed on not only being really well-informed about the news but thinking about how we feel about it. And how can we apply those robust feelings we have about what’s happening to the country to connect with people, using jokes about that sometimes very unhappy or stressful material. And that only happens with robust collaborative relationships on the staff. They say don’t call your workplace a family because they pay you to be there, but it was something like a family and I miss it a lot.
