If you’ve ever wanted to get to know Lady Gaga better Stephen Colbert is here to help. On Monday night’s (Dec. 1) Late Show, Colbert revisited an interview he did with Mother Monster earlier this year at New York’s The Bitter End nightclub, during which she participated in his seriously silly Colbert Questionert interrogation.
The host hit her with an easy one early one: the best sandwich. Well, it wasn’t that easy. Gaga quickly answered Italian sub, but then busted out her impeccable French to give props to ham, butter and cheese on a baguette. “So an Italian sub, but in French,” Colbert clarified.
Then things started to get a bit more serious with a query about the first concert Gaga ever attended. Turns out it was a Jingle Ball show where the Goo Goo Dolls played amid a flurry of fake snow that broke her brain. “They had snow and I was losing my mind. It was my first experience with production in an arena. I was crying,” Gaga recalled.
According to Gaga, the scariest animal is any really large bird, like a big, scary hawk that might spirit you away to its nest and, if she had to choose between apples and oranges, she’d definitely go orange, seemingly to Colbert’s chagrin.
“You judged me,” she said in mock horror. I felt you go, ‘oh, New York, big apple!’” No, Colbert explained, it’s just that you can’t spread peanut butter on an orange, though Gaga did remind him that you can dip an orange in dark chocolate, which seemed to ease his mind.
To her recollection, Gaga said she’s never asked another famous person for their autograph, but when fans give her a piece of their art she does ask them to sign it.
And then came the big one, or as we like to call it the Keanu Question: what do you think happens when we die? “I’m not sure,” Gaga admitted with a heavy sigh. “I think we all vanish into each other. I say that on stage every night, but I think it’s just what I believe… Like I definitely believe that the soul is like kind of forever here in some way. That you go from being in one place to being everywhere.” Asked if she could sometimes sense those souls, Gaga said yes, that sometimes when people pass she thinks “‘they’re everywhere now.’”
Gaga said her favorite action movie is the 1993 Clint Eastwood political thriller In the Line of Fire, that she prefers a window seat for a feeling of safety and that her favorite smell is, awww, the scent of her fiancé Michael Polansky’s neck, noting that he doesn’t wear cologne and that bottled scents are her least favorite smell.
For a probing question about her earliest memory, Gaga got existential, asking for a clarification about whether it was her earliest memory in life. “Or before life if you can think that early,” Colbert shot back. Turns out the first thing Gaga can remember is getting really excited when her parents gave her a toy kitchen set. “I remember being really excited because I could play house,” she said.
As for what song Gaga would pick if she only had one tune to listen to for the rest of her life, Gaga chose John Lennon’s “Imagine,” explaining that she grew up very close to the Strawberry Fields Lennon memorial in New York’s Central Park. “That has a very special significance for me,” she said.
And finally, she described her life in five words: “It’s going to be great, hopefully.”
Gaga is preparing to wrap up her Mayhem Ball tour dates for the year with a pair of upcoming shows at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne, Australia on Friday (Dec. 5) and Saturday (Dec. 6).
Watch Gaga take the Colbert Questionert below.
