After an hour and a half of watching Stephen Colbert wear funny hats with John Cleese, pirouette around the stage to his house band during commercial breaks, and learn to step dance with Michael Flatley, Colbert emerged from backstage to ask us, the audience, if we had enjoyed the show. After we cheered, he nodded and admitted he had too, and then he rubbed his thumb into his palm. "That's why I hate to be the one to tell you this," he started.

Colbert told the 300 or so of us in the audience that during taping, terrorists had attacked the city of Paris. He told us "many are dead" and that the situation was still ongoing. The room sucked in its collective breath, a vacuum where laughter had just been. People were looking around, waiting for a punchline that never came. I kept wondering, How many? Five? Five hundred? Five thousand? And then hated myself for thinking that that mattered.

I reached for my cell phone in my coat pocket. We were instructed to turn off our mobile devices before entering the studio, but I so badly wanted to send a text to my sister who is currently studying abroad in England. Friends of hers in the program were likely in Paris for the weekend. Girls she shared a kitchen with in their tiny West London flat. I didn't dare turn it on.

Without ceremony, Colbert sat at his desk and informed us he'd have to tape a message acknowledging what had happened. The light had left his face. He was visibly shaken and sad. After a few awkward exchanges with producers about which camera to look into and where to sit, Colbert taped this off-the-cuff message: