Stephen Colbert Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 free Stephen Colbert trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Stephen Colbert spent nine years playing a blowhard pundit so convincingly that a word he coined on night one ended up in the dictionary, a real super PAC raised over a million dollars in his name, and a space agency named hardware after him. Then he dropped the character, took over a CBS institution and hosted it for more than a decade until the network pulled the plug in 2026. These 100 questions run the whole arc: the South Carolina boyhood and the Chicago improv years, Strangers with Candy and The Daily Show, The Colbert Report's segments, stunts and coinages, the super PAC and the mock campaigns, the 2006 Correspondents' Dinner, the Late Show's premiere, ratings fights and finale, plus the Peabodys, Grammys, Tolkien fandom and the menagerie of things named for him. It suits a late-night fan, a comedy trivia night or anyone who has ever shouted 'Nation!' at a television: play on your phone with instant explanations, or print it and read it aloud. Every answer is cited to a reference page.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word that Colbert introduced on The Colbert Report's first episode became Merriam-Webster's 2006 word of the year?
Truthiness
Truthiness was a same-day substitution: the script's word was 'truth' until Colbert stopped a rehearsal on the day of the first taping and told his writers it wasn't stupid enough.
Q 02Colbert won NASA's 2009 poll to name a space-station module; what did NASA name after him instead?
A treadmill
A treadmill, the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill or COLBERT, flew to the station in 2009, while the module itself was named Tranquility.
Q 03Which Fox News host's program did Comedy Central's one-line pitch for The Colbert Report name as its model?
Bill O'Reilly
Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor was the template: the pitch was 'our version of the O'Reilly Factor with Stephen Colbert', and the network committed to an eight-week tryout without a pilot.
Q 04Which actor was the first guest when The Late Show with Stephen Colbert premiered in September 2015?
George Clooney
George Clooney shared the opening night with Jeb Bush, and Colbert thanked David Letterman and joined Mavis Staples and other musicians for 'Everyday People'.
Q 05The Colbert Report's 2014 finale had Colbert fly off with Santa, a unicorn Abraham Lincoln and which game-show host?
Alex Trebek
Alex Trebek boarded the sleigh after Colbert accidentally killed Death and became immortal, closing nine years and 1,447 episodes on December 18, 2014.
Q 06Which veteran White House reporter chased Colbert through the halls in his 2006 Correspondents' Dinner video?
Helen Thomas
Helen Thomas, a vocal critic of the Bush administration, pursued Colbert after he fled the briefing room in a mock audition tape to replace departing press secretary Scott McClellan.
Q 07Colbert grew up in South Carolina, but in which city was he born in 1964?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. was his birthplace; his father, an immunologist, later became medical school dean at the Medical University of South Carolina, and the family settled near Charleston.
Q 08Colbert, a lifelong Tolkien devotee, has a cameo as a Laketown spy in which Middle-earth film?
The Desolation of Smaug
The Desolation of Smaug (2013) put Colbert, his wife and two sons on screen as Laketown extras; he later moderated Lord of the Rings cast reunions and in 2026 was announced as co-writer of a new film in the franchise.
Q 09Which musician was the final guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's May 2026 finale?
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney closed the 79-minute finale on May 21, 2026 by singing the Beatles' 'Hello, Goodbye' with Colbert, Elvis Costello and the house band, ending a run that began in September 2015.
Q 10At Second City Chicago, Colbert's first professional job was understudy to which future star of The Office?
Steve Carell
Steve Carell and Colbert went on to The Dana Carvey Show together and later feuded on The Daily Show in the 'Even Stevphen' segment, where every debate dissolved into shouting.
Q 11Colbert's 'March to Keep Fear Alive' merged with whose 'Rally to Restore Sanity' on the National Mall in October 2010?
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart billed his rally as a call to 'take it down a notch' on behalf of the 70 to 80 percent of the country he said were drowned out by a loud few; the joint event drew an estimated 215,000 people.
Q 12In 2006 Colbert told viewers to edit which animal's Wikipedia article to claim its African population had tripled?
Elephants
Elephants were the test case for 'wikiality', Colbert's word for a reality that becomes true once enough users agree, and the stunt set off a wave of edits to elephant and Africa articles.
Q 13Which animals did Colbert's pundit character fear above all, calling them 'godless killing machines'?
Bears
Q 21Colbert's red bracelets, sold after he broke his wrist in 2007, parodied which athlete's charity wristband?
Lance Armstrong
Lance Armstrong's yellow 'Livestrong' band was the model for Colbert's 'Wriststrong'; he broke his left wrist doing his pre-show warm-up, and every dollar went to the Yellow Ribbon Fund.
Q 22What kind of book did Colbert and his wife Evelyn publish together in September 2024?
A cookbook
A cookbook, Does This Taste Funny?: Recipes Our Family Loves, centres on the Lowcountry cooking of coastal South Carolina, where Colbert grew up and his wife's family is from.
Q 23Which bandleader opened The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2015 with his band Stay Human and left in 2022?
Jon Batiste
Bears were his standing terror on the 'ThreatDown' segment that ranked the five greatest threats to America; the character felt deeply threatened by anyone with more power than he had.
Q 14Which ice-cream maker launched 'Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream' in 2007, with Colbert's proceeds going to charity?
Ben & Jerry's
Ben & Jerry's unveiled the flavor in February 2007, and at its on-air launch Colbert had guests taste it for him because he had given up sweets for Lent.
Q 15Which game did the teenage Colbert later describe as his early experience in acting and improvisation?
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons hooked him in seventh grade, and by his own account he put more effort into the game than he ever did into his schoolwork.
Q 16Which snack brand lent its name to Colbert's 'Hail to the Cheese' coverage of his own 2008 White House run?
Doritos
Doritos sponsored 'The Hail to the Cheese Stephen Colbert NachoCheese Doritos 2008 Presidential Campaign Coverage', as Colbert ran only in South Carolina as a 'favorite son'.
Q 17Colbert's 2012 Peabody Award praised his Super PAC segments for teaching viewers about which Supreme Court decision?
Citizens United v. FEC
Citizens United v. FEC (2010) is the ruling that made super PACs possible, and Colbert's own super PAC exposed the loopholes, or 'loop-chasms', by raising over $1 million on air.
Q 18Who played Jerri Blank, the 46-year-old ex-con back in high school on Colbert's co-creation Strangers with Candy?
Amy Sedaris
Amy Sedaris, who also co-created the series, modelled Jerri on Florrie Fisher, a motivational speaker whose public-service film The Trip Back a fellow creator found on tape in an East Village video store.
Q 19On Strangers with Candy, Colbert's teacher Chuck Noblet dispensed inaccurate information in which subject?
History
History was Noblet's subject, and his other running joke was a 'secret' affair with art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck that everyone around them could plainly see.
Q 20Colbert's 1999 Comedy Central sitcom Strangers with Candy was conceived as a parody of which TV genre?
After-school specials
After-school specials supplied the form, with every episode a morality play in which Jerri Blank makes the wrong choice; it was Comedy Central's first live-action narrative series.
Jon Batiste's Stay Human replaced the CBS Orchestra, which promptly reverted to its old Letterman-era name; Colbert announced the departure on August 11, 2022.
Q 24When Colbert joined The Daily Show in 1997 as a correspondent known on air as 'the new guy', who was its host?
Craig Kilborn
Craig Kilborn left at the end of 1998, and his successor gave the show a sharper political focus; Colbert was one of four field correspondents filing mock network-news reports from remote locations.
Q 25Colbert's Daily Show religion segment 'This Week in God' was presented with the help of which prop?
The God Machine
The God Machine passed to Rob Corddry when Colbert left for his own show in 2005; Colbert joked that God had an exclusive licensing deal with The Daily Show.
Q 26Colbert voiced Ace in which Robert Smigel cartoon that moved from The Dana Carvey Show to Saturday Night Live?
The Ambiguously Gay Duo
The Ambiguously Gay Duo paired Colbert's Ace with his Second City castmate as Gary, and Colbert kept voicing the hero on SNL until 2011.
Q 27Colbert left Second City for which 1995 Comedy Central sketch show, nominated for five CableACE Awards in 12 episodes?
Exit 57
Exit 57 reunited Colbert with two friends from the Second City touring company, the same trio who went on to make Strangers with Candy.
Q 28Before transferring to Northwestern's theatre program in 1984, Colbert spent two years at which Virginia institution?
Hampden–Sydney College
Hampden–Sydney College had no real theatre scene, yet Colbert's interest in acting grew there; a friend had enrolled, and he had been unsure about attending college at all.
Q 29Which future Friends star shared Colbert's Northwestern improv group, the No Fun Mud Piranhas?
David Schwimmer
David Schwimmer and Colbert were both at Northwestern's School of Communication, which Colbert left in 1986 still intending to be a dramatic actor.
Q 30Colbert's father and two of his brothers died in 1974 when Flight 212 of which airline crashed near Charlotte?
Eastern Air Lines
Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 was attempting to land in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 11, 1974; Colbert was ten, and Paul and Peter were the brothers closest to him in age.