One of the things that makes Stephen Colbert such an easy guy to admire is how sincere he is in his passions: When Colbert loves something—like, say, every single possible aspect of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings—he clearly loves it with all his heart, and utterly without embarrassment or shame. You can apparently add “the music of Chance The Rapper and Childish Gambino” to that list of Colbert’s unabashed obsessions, too, as revealed in a recent video he recorded for Rolling Stone, which might be one of the most beautifully dorky things we’ve ever had the privilege to see.
In the video, Colbert starts from an analysis of the beat and rhyme scheme of “Favorite Song (Ft. Childish Gambino)”—off Chance’s 2013 mixtape Acid Rap—and somehow ends up rapping, from memory, several lines of poetry from Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. (He gets there through Gilbert & Sullivan, too, in case you needed any further evidence that this is the geekiest 3 minutes of music critique ever committed to film.) It is, in other words, a delight, as Colbert cheerfully walks his way from internal rhyme schemes to a discussion of the origins of Tolkien’s mythical world, all with the clear air of a guy who enjoys every single topic he’s touched upon along the way.