For the past few weeks, the internet has been awash in listicles, elegies, and tributes in appreciation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS announced it was canceling last summer. The comedian’s long farewell concludes tonight with the show’s final episode. While there are too many hilarious and heartfelt moments in the show’s eleven seasons to recount, one episode in particular stands out for us at G&G: the debut of Colbert’s original Waffle House song, “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Knuckleheads,” written and recorded with country music star Sturgill Simpson and memorably unveiled at Colbert’s favorite hometown WaHo in Charleston, South Carolina.
After introducing the tune to his New York City studio audience in April 2016, Colbert and Simpson traveled to Waffle House Unit #411—“the Waffle House that I spent my young drunkness in,” Colbert said—for a red-carpet jukebox premiere that ranks among the show’s most delightful and delightfully Southern bits. (A proud South Carolinian, Colbert uses a state-shaped sticker featuring a palmetto and crescent to mark his spot on the studio floor for his nightly monologues.)
The segment shows the duo squeezing into a booth with guests mid-meal, chatting up diners at the high counter, and wearing Waffle House aprons and paper hats as they razz a crew of college-age bros from the kitchen. At the jukebox, Simpson pulls out a pair of giant scissors to cut an oversized ribbon; Colbert smashes a bottle of Champagne to mark the first official spin of their Waffle House etiquette anthem. “Y’all ready to get your minds blown?!” Simpson hollers—and a raucous, waffle-slinging celebration erupts as the music fills the room: They got waffles and bacon and coffee too / but an All-Star breakfast comes with some rules…
Waffle House Area Manager Brandon Rogers was over that unit at the time and recalls Colbert’s crew as super nice and—despite the mayhem that ensued—extremely disciplined. “It ran like clockwork,” Rogers says, “so we were there to make sure everybody had a good experience while that was going on. Our associates were still taking care of customers, and we [managers] were just in the background trying to dodge waffles being thrown at us.”
Ten years later, “No Knuckleheads” remains on the jukebox and is in regular rotation at #411, according to Rogers; photos from the Late Show filming, along with snapshots of Anthony Bourdain and chef Sean Brock, among other prominent visitors, line the walls. In an intriguing confluence of events, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert first aired on September 8, 2015—the same day Waffle House recorded its one billionth waffle sold as it marked the chain’s sixtieth anniversary. Maybe this beloved Charlestonian was destined for Waffle House greatness all along.
