“Over the weekend it sunk in that they’re killing off our show,” Stephen Colbert reflected at the top of The Late Show on Monday, following a tempest of outrage over CBS’s suspiciously timed cancellation of the program that had only gained strength over the weekend. “But they made one mistake: They left me alive!” The audience responded with chants of “Stephen! Stephen!”—which, in retrospect, was the first clue that the host’s taunt was not entirely a joke.  Advertisement Advertisement Since