On his show a few days ago, he interviewed someone who’d written a biography of JD Salinger. The book’s author talked about how World War II and Salinger’s experience walking into a concentration camp made him the author he was. Without the war, according to this biographer, we would not have had the JD Salinger who wrote Catcher in the Rye. To which Stephen replied, without skipping a beat, “So I guess we owe Hitler at least a small apology.” This was followed by a moment of shocked silence as the author looked at Colbert as though he’d just arrived from another galaxy. I don’t know what happened after that because I was laughing too hard.