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| Interview with Stephen Colbert at the Y |
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| Written by Michelle Haimoff | |||||||
| Wednesday, 24 October 2007 | |||||||
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“I love playing a high status idiot.” Raucous laughter. It’s hard to tell if Stephen Colbert is being funny when a packed crowd of white people in flip-flops dies laughing at everything he says. Such was the scene at the 92nd Street Y last night where I heard him speak with New York Times columnist Frank Rich. My first question going in was whether I was going to see Stephen Colbert, the man, or Stephen Colbert, the character. It’s hard to know what you’re getting when the two share the same name. It turns out the guy who showed up last night was the man, which is what I was hoping for. The tone of the interview was akin to that of Inside the Actor’s Studio, which is appropriate since Colbert is an actor at heart (he even belted out a few lines of Jesus Christ Superstar to prove the point). But perhaps even more than an actor, Colbert is a performance artist, and a subversive one at that. When asked about his controversial career masterpiece, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Colbert said that he came across a German blog that described it as: “if one could place shining terror in bottles.” He went onto say that for a long time no one wanted to seem anti-American or question the president’s moves in a time of crisis, but that this particular crisis was never going to end. “I think the American public has been ill-served for a number of years.” He said. Thunderous applause. Personally, I don’t think anyone quite gets how brave his stint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner really was. When that happened, it proved that he’s the rare breed of person who is willing to sacrifice himself for the betterment of our world. He's a revolutionary first, and an entertainer second. He's like the charismatic student activist from Les Mis who dies gloriously on the barricade. Or John Galt. For those of us who are disillusioned, he is something real. He just happens to be a comedian. Colbert’s employment of humor to get his point across, or use of unsophisticated words like “truthiness,” shouldn’t obscure or detract from his goal of making our political world more honest and accessible. But unfortunately, the comedy that enables him to get away with the type of searing criticism he doled out at the Correspondents’ Dinner does unavoidably cancel out the magnitude of what he’s getting away with. He should have won the Nobel Prize for that speech, instead he got VH1's Big in '06 Award. But I digress. Rich asked him a number of questions about the show itself: The hardest part? “It’s ‘The Word’ everyday that really cracks our spine,” Colbert says. It needs to be a cogent point with a counterpoint. It’s also verbose (this is the segment where the sub-context appears on the screen as he speaks into the camera), and current. Yet he adds that the Colbert team sometimes refers to the show as “The Joy Machine,” because “when it’s joyful, it’s effortless. It’s a good kind of tired.” His favorite part? The hodgepodge of characters that end up sitting around doing or saying random things. He talks about one of his favorite episodes in which Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky moderates a “Metaphor-Off” between Colbert and Sean Penn. For a man who never deviates from character, it is almost ironic how much Colbert enjoys when his guests act human without the rigid self-consciousness that their high profile lives so often require. When asked who his dream guest is, he jokingly says JD Salinger. When asked again, seriously, he says Salinger again, seriously. “But I’m a huge fan of Salinger,” he continues, “and it would be hard not to worship him.” I know what you mean, Stephen Colbert.  Photo:liltree, Creative Commons, Flickr Disclosure: Even though Stephen Colbert is my hero, and tall and sickly white and clearly emotionally unavailable, all of which I love, I understand that he has a wife and kids and that it would be wrong for us to be together. I understand this even in my lame as lemon dreams about him where, fingers intertwined, we talk about how he has a wife and kids and it would be wrong for us to be together. I do not own stock in Viacom (VIA - 39.46). Culture 
Event Coverage 
Michelle Haimoff 
VIA 
Comments
(4)
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written by Passing Stranger , October 25, 2007
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written by CZephyr , October 26, 2007
I think you are accidently confusing the word "anger" with "passion." Anger wouldn't have come out as nicely placed as that, it is with passion that he speaks because he was able to write a speech and a character that supports his view of his government.
I don't think he's an angry person, angry people are people who swear at their coworkers or their children. He is simply passionate about what he cares about.
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written by J Hudson , October 29, 2007
My fear with Colbert (who I agree is funnier and sharper than the Daily Show) is that his show is a catharsis which is a substitute for thought and action. While it is on target about hypocrisy and bad leadership, it's a political dead end if it leads to no deeper understanding of America. More useful than mockery -- or even than getting people to buy AmeriCone Dream, which is good -- would be to ask why so many viewers want to watch Bill O'Reilly (or listen to Limbaugh) in the first place. Rush Limbaugh's audience: about 15 million. Colbert's audience: about 2 million. (Suggestion for The Word: ratio.) If I had the luxury of believing American politics would miraculously improve next year, I could enjoy Colbert's wit more freely. But the looming difference in the size of the audiences, and the apparent lack of any attempt at understanding between the respective groups, blunts my appetite.
About eighty years ago, there was a funny, sarcastic, sharp-tongued writer named Mencken. He covered the Scopes "Monkey" trial with devastating results; maybe he incidentally did about eighty years of damage to American democracy as a side effect. Sarcasm works by exclusion. Mencken drew a line -- and most Americans, according to polls about religious belief, are still on the other side of that line. Colbert himself is an interesting story: a Southerner who shed his accent because he felt people with Southern accents were perceived as dumb, and ultimately moved to New York to become a Blue State media phenomenon. On the one hand, I'm in awe of his performance skills (which, if anything, I think are underrated). On the other hand, as an aspect of the red/blue culture war, I'm ambivalent about what the Colbert Report represents. Here's a joke I heard on WNYC/NPR during their fundraiser a couple of weeks ago, where they were giving away Colbert's book for $ 120 donations: For readers in the blue states, the book contains a thoughtful analysis of world politics and current events. For readers in the red states, there are several pages of colorful stickers. (Cue guilty laughs in the WNYC studio.) Last night Turner Classic Movies ran "Elmer Gantry." Any five minutes of this film does a lot to explain what is left out on Comedy Central. (Plus it gives you an insight into Larry Craig and Ted Haggard.) And if you get "Gantry" and "Borat" together on Netflix, you'll have a double feature that at least begins to make one think about the deeper forces that make the certainty of Limbaugh, or of the "700 Club," more appealing to some than the skepticism of Colbert (or of Mencken). The Colbert Report is clever. Cleverer still, as the world hurtles to oblivion without any useful US leadership, would be figuring out how to cross the bridge to all the voters on the Limbaugh channel.
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written by Colbert fan , June 08, 2008
He is a fun chap! I was a bit surprised about the liberty he takes with facts. He said Gandhi drank his urine. That is untrue. It was Morarji Desai, a Prime Minister for a short term, who did.
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Those of us who are just as angry (about this Administration, about the debasement of political discourse, about virtually everything Colbert satirizes) are damned lucky that he is able to channel _his_ anger so effectively.