One of the many recurring gags on The Colbert Report was Stephen Colbert’s undying love for putting his name on things. It was an extension of his character’s extreme narcissism, and it resulted in memorable gags like minor-league hockey mascot Steagle Colbeagle The Eagle and NASA’s “Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill.” The Colbert character from the Comedy Central show may be dead now, but he’d be happy to know that the real Stephen Colbert is still getting things named after him.
This week, on Colbert’s Late Show, he made a joke about the Weather Channel naming the recent snowstorm Winter Storm Stella, because—as he noted—the network doesn’t actually have any authority to name storms. Evidently emboldened by this shout-out on network television, the Weather Channel decided to lean in to the joke and preemptively announced that the third winter storm of the 2017-2018 season will be called Winter Storm Colbert.
The Weather Channel has also shared its own video about the announcement, which brilliantly pokes fun at Stephen Colbert by predicting that Winter Storm Colbert will “start small” in Chicago and then move to New York where it will “build momentum on the back of a much bigger and better lead-in storm.” After that, it will “blow hard” but have “little to no impact.”