Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Looking for work, Colbert took an interview with Madeleine Smithberg, cocreator, with Lizz Winstead, of The Daily Show, Comedy Central’s late-night replacement for Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Smithberg already knew Colbert’s work. She had loved him (and Carell) in the stupidly hilarious “Waiters Who Are Nauseated by Food” sketch from The Dana Carvey Show. More than funny, it showed that Colbert’s direct gaze—“Waiters” was shot head-on, Colbert looking straight into the camera—suggested a kind of compatibility with the network news format. He could make a convincing mock-anchor. (“If you have an opportunity to give it right to the audience,” Colbert would say, “there’s a special connection that you make by looking at the camera.”) The Daily Show was only in its first season.

  “What are you doing now?” they asked Colbert at his interview.

  “I’m a correspondent at GMA.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Colbert pitched them the nearly thirty story ideas Good Morning America rejected. The Daily Show loved them, and Colbert. In those early days, The Daily Show creators were most interested in lampooning the news media (as opposed to lampooning the news itself, like SNL’s Weekend Update), and Colbert came perfectly cast. “My joke is always that Stone Phillips really deserves a ‘created by’ credit on The Daily Show,” Smithberg said. “We studied that guy. It became, Okay, we pretend we’re him and mix it with stories that are much more absurd.”

  In 1997 Colbert was hired for season two. “I did not believe in the show,” he would confess. “I did not watch the show, and they paid dirt.”

  One of a handful of Daily Show field reporters, Colbert played a Stone Phillips type assigned to the inane human-interest stories on the local news. His most ambitious work on The Daily Show came in the field, as his subjects began to reveal themselves. Real people, they had no script, which forced Colbert to throw out all his preparation, all his jokes, and improvise. Take, for instance, “Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are,” the Daily Show piece about Gaydar, the product—invented by a heterosexual boy—that helped gay people find each other (and inadvertently attracted squirrels). “But then we got there,” Colbert said, “and it turns out the guy was a hairdresser, a professional dancer, and a makeup artist, and a wedding photographer, and liked to dress up as the Village People, and was not gay.” Colbert spends the interview trying to get him to come out.

  “Are you . . . gay?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Let’s say you’re—I don’t know—gay. You’ve got Gaydar. What happens?”

  “What I would do is look around. Hopefully someone else would be looking around as well.”

  “And if you made contact, then you could go get all gay someplace . . .”

  “That’s right, yeah.”

  “. . . you could gay it up . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “. . . go someplace and gay off . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re not gay.”

  “No, no.”

  It was Colbert who suggested his old Second City scene partner to The Daily Show executives.

  “You guys should hire this guy named Steve Carell,” he said, “there’s nothing he can’t make funny.”

  Already a fan of Carell’s from “Waiters Who Are Nauseated by Food,” Smithberg watched his audition tape (“The top half of his body was dead straight but the bottom half of his body was going nuts”) and only loved him more. She offered him the job. But in 1999, The Daily Show was only just another cable show; Carell’s agents urged him not to accept.

  Carell ended up taking the job, though it disturbed him trying to win laughs at his subjects’ expense; it was the ugly opposite of his Second City training, to make the other person look good. And it was shooting fish in a barrel. Colbert felt the same. “In the olden days [of The Daily Show],” he said, “you wanted to take your soul off, put it on a wire hanger, and leave it in the closet before you got on the plane to do one of these pieces. We had deep, soul-searching discussions on flights out to do stories, going, ‘We don’t want to club any baby seals.’”

  Carell went to Colbert for advice. “You can’t be yourself,” Colbert advised him. “You have to go out there in the armor of a correspondent and play a role. Play it as a journalist taking it very seriously; it just happens to be a ridiculous story.” Playing himself as a character, a buffoon, “a failed national news anchor who was demoted, and was now doing this cable show, and had a real attitude about it,” Carell could share in the humiliation. “And that was also a way to protect yourself,” he said, “because it was very scary to be in front of these people, essentially improvising with someone who doesn’t know they’re doing a scene with you.”

  Carell approached the interviews as if he were improvising with the best scene partner imaginable, someone so good they don’t even seem like they’re playing a part. “Short of having both a comedic background and journalistic experience,” he said, “I would say having any sort of improvisational experience is probably the biggest help [to working on The Daily Show] because essentially you’re doing these pieces and you’re improvising with someone who doesn’t know that they are your improv partner.”

  Still, in those first years of The Daily Show, mean-spiritedness trumped its creators’ original intentions, to satirize the glut of twenty-four-hour news channels and attendant influx of time-filling “news.” Excepting the show’s self-mocking field reporters, most memorably Colbert and Carell, a certain snarky nihilism, the comic position of choice for the internet’s adolescent years, undermined the satirical integrity of The Daily Show.

  Harold and Erica Ramis were on their way to LaGuardia when the first plane hit. They watched the second plane hit on an airport lounge TV, and simultaneously, through the airport window.

  Second City improviser Keegan-Michael Key went to Joyce Sloane. “You’ve been here for forty-four years. Is this the worst thing?”

  “It’s the worst thing, Keegan. It’s the worst thing that has ever happened.”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Worse.”

  “Kennedy . . .”

  “Worse.”

  18

  2001–2008

  After a half century as a professional satirist, decoding American “logic” and behavior from Eisenhower to George W. Bush, Jules Feiffer hung up his outrage and retired from cartooning. He said, “It seems to me what made me a serious political artist was that I always believed that what I did, along with other cartoonists, could effect change in some way. I no longer have that illusion. Nothing I could do is going to change the mind of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney.” He would illustrate children’s books. He would teach. “This is an essentially conservative country,” he concluded, “that had a left-wing fling in the ’30s, during the New Deal, because everyone was broke.” The conspiratorial dissent of the ’50s was gone. “We were members of a comic underground,” Feiffer wrote, “meeting in cabarets and cellar clubs, making startlingly grave and innovative jokes about virginity, Jewish mothers, HUAC and J. Edgar Hoover.”

  Thank God, he thought, for The Daily Show. He watched every night before bed.

  The 2000 Bush vs. Gore presidential election was a Kafkaesque sitcom of hanging chads and Floridian quagmires. Remember? We were all wondering who was winning and who was actually winning? “By day fourteen,” Daily Show creator Madeleine Smithberg explained, “the ‘real media’ did not know what to do, and they would use our clips [because] we dealt in absurdity and were the only ones who could make sense of it.” If insane was the new sane, then The Daily Show was the sanest show on the air. “All of a sudden,” Smithberg said, “the pets were running the pet store.”

  But it was their 9/11 coverage, and the leadership of host Jon Stewart, that elevated The Daily Show even higher, from the country’s sanest news source to its most honored.

  Following the 2001 attacks, The Daily Show went off the air for nine days. When it returned, on September 20, Stewart
recouped his viewers with a deeply personal, highly vulnerable opening, more confessional than journalistic. “I wanted to tell you why I grieve, but why I don’t despair . . .” The nine minutes to follow were piercingly humane and in levelheaded contrast to America’s other, bigger TV news sources, then drowning in sensationalism. At that moment The Daily Show finally became its intended self: the pinprick to the bloviated balloon of TV news.

  To Jules Feiffer, it was—as he had been fifty years before in the Village Voice—a long-silenced cri de coeur, the only meaningful political satire available.

  Paul Sills loved The Daily Show.

  Alan Arkin’s improvisation workshops were open, as Viola Spolin’s once were, to people of all kinds, from Bennington College students to the Native Americans of New Mexico. The players, naturally, began in fear, but with time and trust, their playing sparked spectacular fireworks of personal revelation. A communal state of grace; Arkin had been there before. He explained, “In every spirit tradition that I know . . . that’s the whole problem of human existence. Just letting go and seeing what occurs. Letting go of your agenda. Seeing who you are without any external impulse and [discovering that] the whole promise that’s deep inside is more exciting and glorious than anything you can invent.” So, to free them from second-guessing themselves out of their instincts, Arkin prohibited all attempts at humor or imagination. Instead he had his students throw around the old invisible ball, then transformed it into a piece of rope, a suitcase, a squirrel, and in a matter of minutes, the whole room, without trying to, transformed into a creative entity.

  “You failed!” Arkin would laugh. “The instruction was not to be creative, not to be interesting. Why were you creative?”

  Almost always the answer would come back: “It’s our nature to be creative.”

  They had—to use Arkin’s phrase—become like idiots of God.

  Invariably, at the end of every workshop, a student would ask Arkin, “How do we bring this back to the real world?”

  The question always made him laugh. “This is the real world!”

  The improvisers T. J. Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi did not begin with a suggestion from the audience. When the lights came up onstage, at the start of one of their hourlong improvised two-person plays, T. J. and Dave would be watching each other’s eyes, waiting for subliminal cues. An unconscious gesture, a mood, a look in one stirs something in the other, which stirs something back—a suggestion—and a scene begins. Call it a process of elimination. “Before those lights come up,” Jagodowski explained, “literally the possibilities are infinite. But as soon as the lights come up, a bunch of possibilities are removed. And someone moves or someone looks at something—other possibilities are removed. What we end up trying to get to is this sense that we are now doing the one and only thing that this was absolutely from the beginning.” Each meaning gleaned from the other’s gleaning spun off a character from the hurricane of possible characters, as variable as the world’s population, swirling invisibly around them. In T. J. and Dave’s mind these characters were real people, merely waiting to be discovered. They had full lives, children, jobs, histories, pets. T. J. and Dave’s job was to step into the swirl and bring them down to the stage. The stare was their séance, their “discovery of what is already there,” Pasquesi said, “not what I can make it into.”

  Former students of Del Close’s, T. J. and Dave were Chicago’s foremost practitioners of slow comedy. Other improvisers, citing Bernie Sahlins’s golden rule, talked of playing at the top of their intelligence, but in truth, only paid lip service to the lessons of honesty and not going for the joke. T. J. and Dave really did respect the pace and people of real life. Patience gave them the time to feel each other out for what they called “heat” and “weight.” Heat was the energy of their relationship. Do we feel like an old married couple? Do we feel like teammates? Enemies? Weight was their predicament.

  T. J. and Dave, the steadiest improvisers since Nichols and May, played without a net. They never “stepped outside” the scene to “take you to” another time or location. Unlike improv comedians, they did not work to heighten a funny idea. It’s the wind of the relationship that moves them. If no wind comes, they just wait. “Improvisation is itself an exercise in faith,” Pasquesi said. “In faith of Improvisation. That if I do the next tiny thing, all will be fine.”

  Career improvisers, T. J. and Dave were not auditioning for Lorne Michaels or developing material for their comedy pilot. Their show—Wednesday nights at 10:30 p.m. at iO—was their intended and final destination. The first time Bernie Sahlins saw them, he turned to his wife, Jane, and conceded that, yes, after fifty years, improvisation was something more than a tool. In the right hands, it was an art form.

  In Los Angeles, Elaine ran into Victor Kemper, Mikey and Nicky’s fired and then rehired cinematographer.

  “By the way,” she said. “Remember that scene we shot? At the graveyard?”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Wasn’t there something else? Didn’t I shoot a scene to cover that?”

  They hadn’t seen each other in thirty years.

  “Elaine,” Kemper said. “I don’t store that stuff.”

  On September 20, 2004, the day after Mike Nichols’s Angels in America became the most-awarded show in Emmy history and The Daily Show added two more Emmys to its CV, Stephen Colbert met with Doug Herzog, head of Comedy Central, to discuss the idea for a Daily Show spin-off. It was the surge of fan mail and phone calls imploring Comedy Central to air episodes of “The Colbert Report,” which at the time was no more than fake promos these Daily Show viewers had taken for real. (“I’m Stephen Colbert and this is the Colbert Report. It’s French, bitch.”) “With Stephen,” said executive producer Ben Karlin, “we said, ‘Let’s not just let him go off and become a huge star and not be working with the guy.’” And so The Colbert Report got its green light in much the same way Colbert and his team of writers—most of them trained improvisers and regular guests at UCB in New York—would come to green-light their own segments: through an improvisational feedback loop of on-air initiations and audience responses.

  In fact, Colbert thought of The Colbert Report as a living exchange between his character, self-satisfied archconservative pundit “Stephen Colbert,” and his audience. It was a drama of ideas, an ongoing twenty-two-minute, two-character scene. Night after night, his character’s intention was to further indoctrinate his acolytes and recruit their total sympathy and devotion.

  Its success would come from Colbert’s gutsy balance of script and improvisation. Colbert knew that hewing to the jokes—carefully preassembled by him and his writing staff—was vital to sustaining his argument, but also that the emotional life of “Stephen Colbert,” what elevated his show from commentary to art, he drew from real-time listening and reacting. “The trouble with the jokes,” he explained, “is that once they’re written, I know how they’re supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I’m more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.”

  Before every taping, Colbert—the real Colbert—would appear before his live audience for a question-and-answer session, a conversation geared to warming them up but also, and perhaps more importantly, creating a connection between them, host and acolytes. After he took the last question, he would explicitly state as much. “This show has two characters,” he would say. “I’m one and you’re the other. Have a good show.”

  What followed was the trapeze act, a half-hour swing from the teleprompter to the dog whistle of room tone. “If a particular moment goes well,” Colbert said, “if there’s a roll from the audience, if I manage to catch the wave of their enjoyment, I might vamp a little bit on the back end, do a little filigree on the back end of each of those laugh moments,” back and forth until the guest interview, Colbert’s somersault in midair. “I’m prepared for the idea of [each interview],” he e
xplained, “but the moment is improvised.” Preparation consisted of visiting each guest before the interview and assigning them their “character.” Rather than react to “Stephen Colbert” as their exact selves, he asked that they perform themselves with a degree of patience. “I do the show in character,” he would explain. “He’s an idiot. He’s willfully ignorant of what you know and care about. Please honestly disabuse me of my ignorance and we’ll have a great time”—or, as producer Emily Lazar put it, talk to Colbert as if he were a harmless drunk on the next barstool.

  Colbert’s mock-antagonistic interviews took the form of real debates. Throwing his guests off their intellectual balance and, in turn, reacting to their reactions, Colbert engineered one of the only extended improvisational segments on television, the rare broadcast interview that was actually an interview. Thus did The Colbert Report, a parody, become more real and more credible than most real news programs. To say nothing of Colbert’s celestial wit, speed of association, and cogency, this fact alone—the simple decision to really improvise with his guests—electrified his interview segments with the slight charge of media criticism. Why is this guy, an improviser, who by his own admission knows very little about politics, showing up the pros?

  A miraculous triple axel of political satire, television parody, and legitimate journalism, The Colbert Report had only been on the air a couple of months when, early in 2006, the little Algerian woman who sold Colbert his morning coffee noticed a change in him.