YouTube’s biggest superstar appeared on television last night. For those who don’t know, television is a magic box that spits out light and sounds of reality shows your mom watches.
The game-playing, nonsense-screaming PewDiePie has 39 million YouTube subscribers, and last night he decided to grace The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with his presence. The interview largely focused on Colbert poking fun at the fact that old media is desperate for the kind of attention that guys like PewDiePie and others who play games on YouTube (which is big beyond just PewDiePie) get on the Internet, which puts The Late Show host in stark contrast to his competitor Jimmy Kimmel.
You can watch a quick sample of the segment below on a video that The Late Show (which only has 438,000 subscribers) uploaded to YouTube:
Of course, this is a talk show, so the conversation eventually veered into the preperpared interview jokes that everyone but Bill Murray relies on. Colbert prompted PewDiePie about why he doesn’t swear in his native Swedish — naturally, that led the YouTube screaming head to teach Colbert a few that CBS bleeped out even on YouTube.
But this interview is particularly interesting because Colbert is coming at the “watching people play video games” from a different angle than one of his competitors. Early last month, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live did a bit about making fun of YouTube Gaming. That called down the wrath of the Internet, which really only gave Kimmel more ammo for jokes.
And while Kimmel is deriding that community — and somewhat justifiably based on its behavior — Colbert is embracing it with self-deprecating jokes.