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Stephen Colbert is gracing the cover of the latest issue of GQ, and the celebrity profile accompaniment isn’t exactly what you’d expect from the soon to be Late Show host. Or GQ for that matter. Why? Because it is, so open, so private and truly life-affirming. From the magazine:

“Since last winter, after laying to rest the blowhard host of The Colbert Report and inheriting Letterman’s seat on The Late Show, the most inventive comic of his generation has been consumed with one very large question: Who will he be now?”

GQ editor Joel Lovell shadowed Colbert for a few days, searching for a good answer to that question.

“Before long we were sitting there with a plate of roast chicken and several bottles of Cholula on the table between us, both of us rubbing tears from our eyes. “The level of emotion you’re getting from me right now—I’m not saying it’s dishonest,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s not normal. I’d really love to go to bed. I promise you, I do not spend my time on the edge of tears.”

According to the profile, the “Real” Stephen Colbert is a joyful improviser, deeply interested in the production process that will guide The Late Show through the course of 200+ episodes a year. More interestingly, he opens up about the early tragedy of his life. Mr. Colbert’s father (a dean of St. Louis University and the Medical College of South Carolina) and two older brothers were killed in a plane crash when he was 10. How did he handle that?

“You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that’s why. Maybe, I don’t know. That might be why you don’t see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It’s that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

The editor pressed him on his answer:

“…and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

People will likely continue to wonder which aspect of Mr. Colbert will take the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theatre. But one thing is for sure now: Stephen Colbert’s sincerity will be a huge departure from his predecessor’s ironic deadpanning.  Read the whole profile over at GQ.com.