Although Colbert is from South Carolina, he hasn’t had a southern accent since he was very young. When he was a child he deliberately got rid of it because, as he explained to 60 Minutes, “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.” Instead, Colbert adopted the regionless “boring baritone” of newscasters.

He also altered the pronunciation of Colbert: he says his father always encouraged the kids to decide for themselves whether they wanted the T or not, and by high school he thought of himself as Cole-bare. When he transferred to Northwestern halfway through college, he was bumped up to first class and decided to make the permanent switch after talking about it with the astronaut sitting next to him.