Hey, Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Fallon.

Brady Powers wants your job.

"That's the top dream," said Powers, a Prosper High School senior and host of the school's new student-run comedy show, The Mid Morning After 10, But Still Just Before Lunch Show.

"I really love making people laugh," he said.

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Already, the natural redhead O'Brien look-alike — right down to the hair swoop — is cracking jokes under hot studio lights in a wing of the high school.

He's one of six seniors — all boys — replicating late night comedy modeled by professionals like Colbert, O'Brien and Fallon in the show, which launched in September as part of the school's scholastic broadcast program.

"I was like comedy show, that's not going to work," said Landyn Cason, senior producer for the show. "We're going to be a one-hit wonder."

No such luck.

This semester's sixth episode airs at 10:51 a.m. Thursday.

Now, the Prosper effort has caught the attention of Colbert.

The students and broadcast adviser Brian Kennedy leave this weekend for New York to shadow the comedian Monday for a first-hand look at how The Late Show with Stephen Colbert comes together.

"I was just blown away. I almost fell out of my chair," Kennedy said of reading the email invite from Chris Licht, executive producer and showrunner for The Late Show.

"We would have been happy with a head shot," he said.

Kennedy had pitched Prosper's production to Licht and several other national comedy shows. Licht was intrigued and passed it along to Colbert.

"We watched it and thought it was funny," Licht said. "When a teacher takes pride in something like that, it hit a chord with me."

Hosting high school students is a first for the show, Licht said. The Prosper group will attend the rehearsal and writers and production meetings.

"It seemed like a fun thing to do. I wouldn't suspect we would do it a lot, if ever again," Licht said. "They very much struck me and Stephen as a group that were serious about comedy."

Making them laugh

Watch the show and you'll hear a laugh track (there's no live audience), monologues with quips on strange news like reindeer in Japan trained to deliver pizzas, comedy sketches and interviews. That kind of show is rarity among high school students, educators and industry professionals say.

"A lot of times we're afraid to let kids be funny. We're afraid to do this kind of thing because that just doesn't seem very academic," Kennedy said. "But writing comedy is hard. If they can write comedy, they can write anything."

Because it is a school show, content is censored by Kennedy and administrators. There aren't one-liners about race or anything deemed sexually inappropriate. The students are cautious about politics. Many jokes land in the trash.

"We like our show, and so we don't want to get that taken away. It's definitely an obstacle we have to overcome," said Ty Bowman, the band leader for the show.

Kennedy said he has waited decades to produce a student-run comedy show. He tried it once as a one-man show but said the host at the time wasn't a good fit.

"He didn't come off funny. His timing wasn't right," he said.

But Kennedy saw a comedy show host buried in Brady when he auditioned as the weatherman for last year's Eagle Nation News. A star was born.

"I sat in the control room, and I said, 'I've found him," he said.