As you may have heard, the “Happy Birthday” song recently entered the public domain, and no one is more excited about that development than Stephen Colbert. Colbert’s Late Show team has cooked up more than 1,200 versions of the iconic tune, all of which are addressed to individual names.
The Late Show’s “Happy Birthday” renditions are all derived from a single clip recorded during the show’s October 12th episode, when legendary singer Darlene Love appeared as the musical guest. Love teamed up with Colbert’s house band to perform a soulful version of the timeless birthday salutation, and the Late Show team went to work from there. It filled in the line “happy birthday dear _____” with just about every name you can think of and used a text-to-speech program to sound them out. On November 11th, the birthday of Colbert bandleader Jon Batiste, The Late Show’s personalized birthday messages all went live on a new YouTube channel.
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As you can imagine, the Late Show team had to dig deep to come up with 1,200 names to feature. All common monikers are included, as are deeper cuts like Whoopi, Zabeth, and Malachi. If you have a friend named Legolas, even he can finally get the birthday greeting he deserves.
Given the epic scale of the Late Show’s birthday project, you’re unlikely to find many names left unrecognized. If, however, you have a truly outlandish onomastic suggestion for Colbert and his team, you can share it with them. Not finding your name or someone else’s name?” reads the description within each birthday video. “Suggest it here. We may or may not make it. You don’t always get what you want for your birthday.”
