This week, Stephen Colbert will be addressing a brand-new nation. After nearly a decade of playing a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot,” Colbert will now be taking over the CBS nighttime mainstay The Late Show, succeeding David Letterman. With the end of his eponymous Comedy Central show come many questions, not least among them: Who is Stephen Colbert, really? Below, five things you never knew about your favorite fake pundit.

1. You may already know that Colbert grew up in South Carolina, but you may not know that he consciously trained himself to speak differently from those around him. “At a very young age, I decided I was not gonna have a Southern accent,” Colbert once said. “Because people, when I was a kid watching TV, if you wanted to use a shorthand that someone was stupid, you gave the character a Southern accent. And that's not true. Southern people are not stupid. But I didn't wanna seem stupid. I wanted to seem smart. And so I thought, ‘Well, you can't tell where newsmen are from.’ ”

2. Colbert’s surname is actually pronounced with a hard T, but his father, who favored the French pronunciation, gave Stephen the option to change the pronunciation when he was young. “My dad always wanted to be Col-BEAR . . . so [he] said to us, ‘You can be anything you want,’ ” he once toldThe Charleston Post. “And so we made a choice, and it's about half and half. The girls for the most part are like, ‘Get over it, you're Colbert,’ but I was so young when this choice was given to us, I think that if somebody woke me up in the middle of the night and slapped me across the face, I’d still say Stephen Col-BEAR. But if people don't like what I do on this show, I say, ‘That's Stephen Col-BEAR, I'm Stephen Colbert.’ ”

3. The comedian was the youngest of eleven children. His father, James William Colbert, Jr., was a successful physician, serving as the medical school assistant dean at Yale University, dean at Saint Louis University, and vice president for academic affairs at Medical University of South Carolina. Colbert revealed that his father and two older brothers died in a plane crash when he was ten years old. “It was pretty bad. I don't generally talk about it,” he told the New York Times in 2005.