Back in 2014, the funnyman mocked Daniel Snyder for starting a team foundation to help Native Americans while refusing to drop his franchise's racially insensitive moniker.
- Aug 30, 2018
AceShowbiz - Stephen Colbert feared a misjudged Twitter joke that offended Asian-Americans had cost him his career.
Back in 2014, the funnyman mocked Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins American football team, for starting a team foundation to help Native Americans while refusing to drop his franchise's racially insensitive moniker.
In character as the right-wing host of his old faux news show "The Colbert Report", Stephen joked that he would start his own offensively named foundation, saying: "I am willing to show Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever."
The joke was originally well received, but provoked a storm of outrage when it was repeated out of context on the show's Twitter account - prompting Stephen to worry he'd inadvertently wrecked his career.
"I was getting in a car to go home, and I saw that it exploded," "The Late Show" host tells Rolling Stone magazine. "And I went, 'Uh-oh.' What happened was, just that one line, absent any context, was tweeted out by someone who the week before had been an intern. There was nothing I could do; I wasn't on the air for three days. And I went, 'I've lost complete control of the context of my joke, and maybe I've lost a 25-year career with a single line.'"
The controversy caused the hashtag #cancelcolbert to go viral that weekend - prompting bosses at U.S. network Comedy Central to delete the offending tweet, a decision that enraged Stephen.
"It was the only time I ever really got mad at the network,"he says. "Because they took the tweet down, and I go, 'What're you thinking? Now you've apologised before I can contextualise my response, and now I'm 100 per cent f**ked.'"
The 54-year-old refused to break character until he was back on the air on Monday, when he addressed the incident by admitting that tweeting the joke without context was a mistake. Stephen did leave "The Colbert Report" later in 2014, to take over from David Letterman as the host of "The Late Show".
