Stephen Colbert rolls out red carpet for political Emmy show

LOS ANGELES — If this whole TV thing doesn’t work out for Stephen Colbert, he has a bright future in carpet sales.

The first-time Emmy Awards host helped roll out the show’s ceremonial red carpet Tuesday at L.A. Live alongside telecast producers, saying that while it’s an honour to host the show, “it’s even more of an honour to be installing the carpet.”

“I’m glad there are cameras here because so few people know just how much manual labour is involved with hosting the Emmys every year,” Colbert said. “If you like this, stick around because I’m going to go re-grout the bathrooms right after this.”

Colbert also noted some of the rug’s features (“It’s a Stainmaster carpet. It’s indoor-outdoor.”) And he sang a carpet company’s advertising jingle, which he referred to as “our Emmys red carpet rollout national anthem,” before the promotional rollout.

No sooner had he and the producers finished unrolling it, a pair of workers swooped in to roll it back up and haul it away. (The real red carpet used by celebrities on Sunday will be installed several feet away, in front of the Microsoft Theater.)

Colbert, who has won multiple Emmys for his work on “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” and is nominated again Sunday for “The Late Show,” described the Emmy ceremony as “an incredibly fun show to go to every year when you win.”

“If you lose, it’s an enormous waste of time,” he said. “But everyone’s going to win this year. I’ve talked with these guys and we want everyone to have fun, so everyone will win the Emmys this year. Spoiler. Spoiler alert.”

When asked how political the show could get, Colbert said the Emmys are about celebrating television, “and the biggest television star of the last year was Donald Trump.”

“The fact that he’s not nominated, it’s a crime,” Colbert said. “It’s a high crime and a misdemeanour that you are not nominated, sir. Where’s the investigation of that? Where was James Comey on that?”

And does the host expect the president (and previous Emmy nominee) to tune into Sunday’s show?

“He might care about who wins the reality-show category,” Colbert said. “‘Amazing Race’ is nominated, and that’s who he lost to every year for ‘The Apprentice.’ So he might want to see them go down. He might still have hard feelings. He seems like a guy who holds a grudge.

“He actually said in one of the debates with Hillary Clinton — she said like, ‘And then after he lost the Emmys, he complained they were rigged.’ And he goes, ‘I should have won.’ So he cares! You know he cares. We know you care.”

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen at www.twitter.com/APSandy .

Sandy Cohen, The Associated Press