Prince Harry and Stephen Colbert Courtesy of The Late Show/YouTube
Protecting the family jewels. Prince Harry made Stephen Colbert blush after he followed up on his Spare story about his frostbitten penis.
“We’ve taken quite a leap from grief and trauma to my todger,” the Duke of Sussex, 38, said while on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, January 10, after the host, 58, asked him for an update.
“It’s really hard to have this conversation because there’s no one in the audience that has probably read the book yet apart from you and me,” Harry explained before asking Colbert for another tequila.
In his debut memoir, Spare, available now, the Invictus Games founder recalled traveling to the North Pole in 2011 for a hike with the veterans organization Walking With the Wounded.
“Pa [King Charles III] was very interested, and sympathetic about the discomfort of my frostnipped ears and cheeks, and it was an effort not to overshare and tell him also about my equally tender penis,” Harry wrote. “Upon arriving home I’d been horrified to discover that my nether regions were frostnipped as well, and while the ears and cheeks were already healing, the todger wasn’t. It was becoming more of an issue by the day.”
During his Late Show interview, Colbert asked: “At what point did you realize there was a crisis at the south pole?”
Harry revealed that he didn’t notice there was an issue until he got home. “The problem was, first of all, it didn’t turn into an icicle,” he explained. “It wasn’t just like — ” Harry knocked on the table to demonstrate what he meant.
“Never?” Colbert asked. Harry cheekily responded, “No, well…”
Harry continued, “It’s fine now, thank you. So the context was that these amazing veterans were doing a walk to the North Pole. They had all the training. I had none and I turned up thinking, how bad can this me? It’s only the North Pole. It’s only -35 degrees. … I’ve got all the things that I need. What I didn’t have was what I had when I actually went to the South Pole, which was a c—k cushion.”
Colbert took off his glasses and started blushing. “No one in my life, when I was a child, could ever explain to me that someday the Duke of Sussex was going to say the words ‘c—k cushion’ to me — and that it would all make sense! This is absolutely surreal,” the comedian quipped.
Harry explained that his guide from the first hike helped him get the support he needed. “[There was] a lovely lady who made a cushion for me having been told by the guide from the North Pole, ‘He’s doing this again. He’s going to need some extra protection.’ Because the pants that I was wearing — to you guys, pants are underwear — that’s all I had. So my man piece, my johnson, my wilson, my todger, my willy, all the things, if you need to know any other words, I think the Austin Powers sequence is a very good [guide].”
Colbert chimed in with a couple of more nicknames for Harry’s penis — “the Tower of London” and “Big Ben” — before the military veteran continued, explaining how his genitalia was “frost nipped” without him noticing. “The piece was against one layer of clothing or two very thin layers of clothing to the -35 [degree conditions]. And when you’re walking, you’re hot and you’re trying not to sweat because sweat freezes, and once it’s numb, you don’t know the pain.”
The Archewell cofounder didn’t realize the full extent of the frostbite until “weeks after” he’d returned home. There was “nothing visible, nothing obvious,” on his “todger” right away,” Harry said. “It was a slow, deteriorating situation — very similar to this experience,” the prince quipped.
Luckily, Harry has fully recovered. “How’s your penis? Doing great?” Colbert asked. Harry gave two thumbs up.