US comedian pokes fun at Princess gossip
Television talk show host Colbert mocks internet furore over ‘disappearance of Kate Middleton’
ONE of America’s most prominent comedians has joked about scurrilous rumours concerning the Prince and Princess of Wales on a popular late night television show.
Stephen Colbert, the host of The Late Show on CBS, used his opening monologue on Tuesday night to mock the furore surrounding the Princess following her admission that she had edited a family portrait.
“I’m afraid I’ve got some troubling news about England’s Royal family,” he said. “The United Kingdom has been all aflutter by the seeming disappearance of Kate Middleton.”
He went on to repeat unsubstantiated internet rumours about why the Princess had not been seen in public.
“Oh, my heart goes out to poor Kate,” he said, to laughs and groans from the audience.
Colbert went on to joke about the rumours that he said had been circulating since 2019.
The subject was also raised on Monday night’s show, when the comedian joked about online speculation that “Kate Middleton is dead, Kate Middleton is getting a divorce from Prince William or maybe both”.
The satirical week night show is filmed in New York and regularly tops the late-night talk show ratings in the United States, frequently attracting more than two million viewers.
It is not readily accessible in the UK but clips were posted online and the segment concerning the Princess was shared widely on social media.
It is thought unlikely to go down well with Kensington Palace, which has struggled to quash social media speculation in recent days and is not thought to have been given advance warning about the segment. A spokesman declined to comment. The Princess, who is still recovering from the abdominal surgery she underwent on Jan 17, is understood to have been distressed by the seemingly endless stream of false allegations and rumours, which were only fuelled by the revelation on Monday that she had edited a family photograph before releasing it to the media.
In January 2023, the Duke of Sussex appeared on the programme to promote his memoir, Spare.
On the show, the Duke claimed that his family was engaged in an “active campaign” to undermine his book because it made them feel “uncomfortable and scared”.
The fact that he knows how the system works is “terrifying for them”, he claimed.
“The moment that I started doing therapy, it’s like we started speaking a different language,” the Duke added. “They couldn’t understand me. I was doing my best to try to encourage them to [heal].”
The Duke also admitted that he watches The Crown and “fact checks” it, including the “older stuff and more recent stuff ”. He said that he had previously been “obsessed” with the media but claimed he had weaned himself off it and now worried about “what he put through his eyes” as much as what he put into his mouth.
In lighter moments, the Duke was filmed being greeted at the New York television studio by men dressed as ceremonial guards with trumpets before he was told to move out of the way as the fanfare was for actor Tom Hanks.
The Duke sipped tequila throughout the interview, at one point admitting that he had always wrongly assumed that if he and Meghan had children there was no way “the ginger gene would stand up to his wife’s genes”.