In April 2006, just six months after the premiere of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," comedian Stephen Colbert hosted the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, D.C.
It wasn't exactly a tension-free atmosphere. Colbert delivered pointed and repeated jabs to the press corps and the Bush administration, including President George W. Bush himself, who was there in the room. Colbert's jokes touched on the Iraq War, the president's abysmal approval ratings and his poor handling of Hurricane Katrina eight months earlier.
But one conservative enjoyed the comedian's speech, despite the fact that he was the subject of a few jokes himself: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
This Monday, days after Scalia's death, Colbert recalled that infamous night during an episode of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."
"It was mostly silent while I gave the speech," Colbert remembered. "While I had a good time giving the speech, when it was over, no one was making eye contact with me. The one exception was Antonin Scalia."
The WHCA dinner is always slightly uncomfortable because the subjects of the jokes are often actually present. Colbert, for his part, left no stone unturned in his 2006 remarks, skewering many key conservative figures of the time, including Scalia.
But the comedian said that unlike most of his targets, Scalia took it all in stride.
"No one was talking to me in the whole damn room, and Antonin Scalia comes up to me and said, 'It's great, it's great!'" Colbert said. "I thought, 'Don't you make me love you, old man.'"
For what it's worth, this doesn't appear to be a case of "find something nice to say about someone because they've just died": Colbert was saying the same thing about Scalia six months ago (although that, in turn, was just two months after he said Scalia's head looked like a "flesh-toned cinch sack," because that's how comedy goes).
Watch Colbert's remembrance of Scalia above.
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