Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness

by Bruce Watson

  Later that day, Colbert told his wife about the new host of The Daily Show. It turned out she knew him. Back in the early 1990s, when Colbert was courting Evie long distance, her roommate was dating Stewart. Evie had often seen the young comedian sitting alone at parties, nursing a beer. “Jon Stewart?” she said incredulously. “He’s not funny.”

  That evening, Colbert went to a Manhattan bookstore where Stewart was signing his book, Naked Pictures of Famous People. Chances are, no one noticed when the two men stood face-to-face at the book table. Stewart wrote: “To Stephen, Please don’t hurt me - Jon Stewart.” And as Stewart later said, “after that it was all magic.”

  They were an unlikely couple. Aside from losing their fathers at age ten - Stewart in a bitter divorce, Colbert in a tragic plane crash - they had little in common. One was a wise-cracking New Jersey kid raised, along with his older brother, by a public school teacher. The other came from a huge and distinguished family ensconced in the upper echelons of Southern society. One grew up reading MAD magazine, the other devouring Tolkien. One was Jewish, the other Catholic. One did stand-up, the other sketch comedy. One was a thirty-five-year-old bachelor living with his girlfriend in lower Manhattan, the other a married father of a growing family and living in New York’s tony Westchester County. One spiced his humor with words you couldn’t say on television, the other relied on nuance and parody.

  The man who would come to know them best, writer and producer Ben Karlin, later marveled at the contrast. “Stephen is a happy man,” Karlin said. “He goes home to a lovely wife in New Jersey (the Colberts moved from New York in 2000), with a new dog and three beautiful children. He teaches Sunday school and knows his way around the kitchen. And then he has this deviously brilliant comedic mind. . . . Jon is driven by the forces of guilt and shame and fear of being on the outside that gives Jews their comic angst.” But Stewart and Colbert, Karlin added, share one important trait. “They both really just want to get a laugh.”

  Until that press conference on August 11, 1998, Stewart and Colbert had never met and seemed barely aware of each other. Too old to watch MTV, Colbert had not seen “The Jon Stewart Show” that aired in the early ‘90s. Stewart may have watched Exit 57, but never having visited Second City, he was unaware of Colbert’s improv background. Stewart was intensely political, Colbert avoided politics. But over the next several years, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would merge their respective geniuses to become the most revered comic voices in America.

  The hyphenated name, “Stewart-Colbert,” now saturates American culture as if they are married. Every four years, it emerges on bumper stickers and T-shirts touting them for president and vice president. (At this writing in 2014, there is already a Stewart/Colbert 2016 Facebook page.) The duo routinely appears in gossip columns and news bites summarizing what each said on his most recent show, and pundits have written about the “Stewart-Colbert effect” on TV news. In the fall of 2010, they co-hosted the massive “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Barely more than a year later, they lampooned the entire election process by co-coordinating Colbert’s Super PAC. Working independently, yet in lockstep, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have become, as “Rolling Stone” magazine put it, “America’s Anchors.”

  They are anchors in more ways than one. Each anchors fake news programs, each is also an anchor in a culture that seems increasingly insane. Their co-anchor work began on January 11, 1999, when Stewart took over The Daily Show. “Welcome to The Daily Show!” Stewart began. “Craig Kilborn is on assignment in Kuala Lumpur – I’m Jon Stewart.” Then, after reading the usual fake headlines, he turned to the show’s chief political correspondent, Colbert, standing before a backdrop of the U.S. Capitol.

  Colbert detailed the merchandising surrounding the impending impeachment trial of President Clinton. T-shirts, snow globes, corn holders - all manner of products designed to capitalize on the furor. Chili’s “El Diablo” was the Democrats’ official fajita of the impeachment process, while the GOP was sponsored by “Lying Vindictive Hypocrites.” The segment lasted just two minutes, but it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  Years later, Colbert waxed nostalgic about those early days, joking about how tightly he and Stewart are linked. “We live together, you know,” Colbert told Jimmy Kimmel. “We commute to work on a tandem bicycle.” But seriously, though, “I am so lucky to have Jon Stewart, of all people, call me up on a random day and say, ‘I like that thing you did last night, and here’s why. . . .’ And he’s also just a good, fun guy. I’m lucky to have him as a friend, and as a mentor.”

  Throughout Stewart’s first year behind The Daily Show desk, Colbert continued to hone his deadpan character. As the show’s correspondent, Colbert was not the grandiose, right-wing egotist who would later lead Colbert Nation. Instead, he was that fool’s father. Grim, weighty, and melodramatic, he applied fake sincerity to one strange story after another. Masterful timing enabled Colbert to make even silence funny. The raw rookie, Stewart, could barely contain a smile when introducing the next Colbert segment. In a typical piece, Colbert traveled to Saratoga Springs, New York, “a safe, picturesque community, in reality, but on paper, it’s home to one of the most deadly accidents of our time.” Colbert then explained how 350 residents had been listed as “deceased” on W-2 forms.

  “It was a misalignment in the printer,” said a reporter, his face darkened.

  “How many people died?” Colbert asked.

  “No one died.”

  “Then why the ‘x’ under ‘deceased?’”

  “The printer made a mistake.”

  “And that ended up killing people?”

  Insisting there had been a mass murder, he interrogated city officials:

  “Is there rage?” he somberly asked. “Rage?” He also posed painful questions to the “deceased” seated before him. “All right, so nobody’s dead, but does anyone have anything wrong . . . anything at all?” Silence. Finally, one man said, “My knee hurts.”

  “We only have a minute more,” Colbert concluded. “Does anyone want to cry? We could use some tears.”

  Later, Colbert wrapped up the ongoing Bigfoot series, reporting from central Washington State where Sasquatch had made the Endangered Species List. And on the Wall Street trading floors, Senior Financial Correspondent Stephen Colbert discussed the World Wrestling Federation’s new stock offering. Breaking into a testosterone-fed Hulk Hogan voice, he shouted: “YOU WANNA KNOW WHY THE YEN IS DOWN, YAMAMOTO? BECAUSE YOU PANTYWAISTS CAN’T HANDLE A GOLD-BACKED CURRENCY! THE NIKKEI IS FOR OLD LADIES AND BEDWETTERS!”

  Feeling more in tune with Stewart than Craig Kilborn, Colbert put his own stamp on The Daily Show. When other correspondents left, he was quick to recommend his old Second City foil, Steve Carell. “There’s nothing he can’t make funny,” Colbert told the Daily Show producers. Carell offered his own reports, and teaming with Colbert, the two mimicked the shouting matches of 24/7 cable in their debate segment, “Even-Stevphen.” The first topic was “Weather: Good or Bad?”

  COLBERT: “Every time a Floyd or a Girt lifts their skirt and relieves themselves on the East Coast, Uncle Sam feels obliged to crawl under the plate glass coffee table and throw twenty-dollar bills around. Well, I say ‘show’s over, folks.’ It’s time to pull the plug on weather.

  CARELL: “Balderdash! The federal government should stay out of the natural disaster business. Today, they’re controlling the weather, and tomorrow, who knows? Federal income tax! I’ll bet you and your friend Stalin would like that!”

  COLBERT: “You, sir, are an idiot, and I’ll tell you why: It’s time for those fat cats in Washington to get off their keisters and pass legislation outlawing these hurricanes and tornadoes forever. Or maybe, you just hate . . . children.

  CARELL: “Noooo, I hate you. If tornadoes are outlawed, only outlaws will have tornadoes.”

  COLBERT: “I’m curious Steve. What’s the weather like up your own ass?”r />
  The segment ended with Colbert shouting, “shut up, Shut UP, SHUT UP!” and Carell plugging his ears, chanting “puppy dogs and ice cream!” It soon became a regular feature.

  Having brought this little piece of Second City to television, Colbert was planning another transplant. Shortly after Stewart took over, Colbert cut his Daily Show appearances to just twenty a year. The extra time allowed him to help Sedaris and Dinello create The Way After School Special. In April 1999, “The Three Idiots” debuted the re-titled work, Strangers with Candy.

  A stranger sitcom has rarely been seen. With footage shot in New Jersey high schools, Strangers with Candy featured Jerri Blank, a forty-six-year-old ex-addict who returns to school to get her degree. Sedaris, wearing raccoon eye-makeup and a twisted frown, portrayed Jerri Blank as a warped naïf. Striving to be popular, Jerri sells drugs to classmates, struggles to lose weight, and tries out for homecoming queen. Every episode closed with one of Jerri’s moralistic statements, such as:

  “I guess what I learned this week was:

  “If you’re going to reach for a star, reach for the lowest one you can!”

  “Only losers do drugs, unless it helps you win, and in that case, only winners do drugs!”

  “You never really lose your parents unless, of course, they die, and then they’re gone forever, and nothing will bring them back.”

  Dinello played Geoffrey Jellineck, an insecure art teacher who wants to be as cool as his students. Colbert was Chuck Noblet, a raging, uptight history teacher based on Colbert’s former prep school teachers “who wanted to do anything other than teach.” And to thicken the melodrama, Noblet and Jellineck were closeted gays. Even Evie Colbert got in on the act, her gentle demeanor adding class to a few cameo roles. Strangers got stranger with each episode, drawing cultish fans whom Colbert assumed were “damaged people,” but they alienated the critics.

  “The show lands with a thud,” wrote The New York Times. Jerri’s blunt lines such as: “I’ve got to leave early today. I’m having my uterus scraped” were too much for USA Today, which found Strangers “virtually comedy-free.” But the ratings were good enough to get the show renewed for two more seasons. Weirdness, however, has a short shelf life, and Strangers with Candy was canceled in October 2000.

  With a new century underway, the two sides of Stephen Colbert stood at a crossroads. Looking down one road was the sketch comedian, drawn to performing in skits of Sedaris-style oddity, but he was tiring of snide jokes about small-town eccentrics. Looking down the other road was the faux journalist covering tabloid stories with all the self-importance of CNN. A decade with Dinello and Sedaris had run its course. The “Idiots” were still good friends, but with little to show for their collaboration other than cancellations and mixed reviews. They eventually made a forgettable movie version of Strangers, but Colbert was finding The Daily Show the better road ahead.

  Steering the show into the political arena, Stewart encouraged Colbert to make his correspondent persona more topical. Colbert was skeptical. “I thought topical stuff had an ephemeral quality — it would be meaningless in a week.” But Stewart “infected me with his spirit of satire,” Colbert said, so he began doing more pieces from the studio, often seated beside Stewart. In one, he challenged the charge that the media were feeding kids “a cesspool of sex, vulgarity, and violence.” At the word “violence,” Colbert reached across the desk to slap Stewart in the face. Parents could not compete with the media in raising children, Colbert said. “We in the entertainment industry have parents so outgunned! We’ve got professional writers, digital networks, global distribution systems! What do you have? A handicam and the love for your child? We will bury you! That’s why we must take the children away from their parents and allow them to be raised by the media!”

  Colbert could face down parents because he was proving himself a devoted one. Becoming the father he had lost, he doted on his kids - reading to them, playing, constantly joking. Joy, he said later, is “to be with my wife and children.” By the fall of 2000, Stephen, Evie, Madeleine, and Peter Colbert had moved from Westchester County, which they considered too costly, to Montclair, New Jersey. The Colberts appreciated that suburb’s fine schools, arts, and proximity to Manhattan.

  The move highlighted another contrast between “America’s Anchors.” While Stewart rode to the Daily Show’s midtown office in the backseat of a Comedy Central car, talking on his cell phone to get a head start on each show, Colbert drove to work. He still does. “The network would happily send me home in a car,” he told Vanity Fair. “After all, they don’t want me running off the road. But I’d work the entire way home, and I need more than thirty seconds from the car to the front door to become a dad and a husband again. So I drive home, and I crank my tunes. And by the time I get there, I’m normal again.”

  As the Colberts settled into their routine – Madeleine in first grade, Peter in pre-school, and a third child, John, born in 2002 – the American media spun out of control. Back when Colbert was working at Second City, weird comedians had little competition. TV news seemed sane, its anchors staid, and the graying men behind the desks considered themselves journalists, not entertainers. In those final, pre-Web years, newspapers were mostly reliable and free of the cluttered competition of Web sites, Tweets, and blogs.

  But a decade later, with 24/7 cable spreading and every pol and pundit saying whatever it took to get attention, a comic could scarcely be more outrageous than the media circus. As the age of FOX News and the Drudge Report dawned, opinion replaced fact, rumor was treated as truth, and no conspiracy, however trivial or trumped up, went unnoticed.

  Luckily for Colbert, satire has always feasted on fakes and frauds. “I have never made but one prayer to God,” Voltaire said. “O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.” Stewart, Colbert, and The Daily Show were suddenly blessed with enemies more ridiculous than any god could have provided.

  The year 2000 brought another election, but it would not be just another election. Suddenly, after a year of struggling to find a voice, The Daily Show team of writers and correspondents spoke as one. Stewart recalled the election as “when I think we tapped into the emotional angle of the news for us and found our editorial footing.” In 1996, Craig Kilborn’s Daily Show had ignored the political conventions, but Stewart insisted on full coverage.

  A debut segment - “Indecision 2000” - turned a lackluster campaign into a Swiftian satire of mealymouthed liberals versus uncompassionate conservatives. Senior Political Correspondent Stephen Colbert took it all too seriously. Reporting from the Republican National Convention, Colbert summed up the mood: “Well, Jon, as a journalist I have to maintain my objectivity, but I would say the feeling down here was one of a pervasive and palpable evil. A thick, demonic stench that rolls over you and clings like hot black tar. A nightmare from which you cannot awaken. A nameless fear that lives in the dark spaces beyond your peripheral vision and drives you toward inhuman cruelties and unspeakable perversions. . . .” Then, to emphasize the fakeness of the entire process, Colbert stepped from the convention floor – a space marked by a green screen in the studio - and sat with Stewart at his desk.

  But the campaign was just a warm-up for what followed. When the Florida recount spiraled into legal battles over hanging chads, Colbert left his green screen and traveled to the Sunshine State “to cut through the fog of information and facts.” There he interviewed voters at a senior citizens’ home, calling on “Tiny Turquoise Woman” and “Light Blue Lady.” Then, noting that the recount was being compared to a circus sideshow, he found a Florida circus and interviewed the Fat Man, the Fire Eating Dwarf, and the Snake Charmer.

  “Oh, please,” the 700-pound Mr. Huge told Colbert, “if anybody ran a sideshow the way Bush and Gore are running this thing, they’d be out of business in a week.” Pressed by Colbert, two men whose act consisted of driving spikes into their noses admitted to voting for Bush. “The numbers don’t lie,” Colbert deadpanned. “While 49 pe
rcent of Floridians voted for Gore, 100 percent of Floridians who drive spikes into their heads voted for Bush. Why? Because Bush is the candidate they can relate to.”

  As the end loomed, Colbert used his nauseated waiter routine to announce the next president, retching and holding back vomit at the name. But the Bush victory provided Colbert with ideal targets for his smarmy sincerity. Suddenly, a swamp full of politicians and pundits were touting themselves as saviors of the nation. Colbert studied them carefully. “I tried to ape whoever was the loudest and the rightest in prime-time cable news,” he recalled.

  And as Colbert became “the fake newsman’s” fake newsman, the journalism establishment noticed. In April 2001, for the first time in history, the George Peabody Award for “distinguished achievement and meritorious service by broadcasters” went to a fake news show, The Daily Show, for “Indecision 2000.”

  Just as Colbert was settling into a steady role, he was stunned by 9/11. Ironically, the date marked the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Colbert family tragedy. Colbert’s sister Elizabeth was in Manhattan that morning in a building near the World Trade Center. Fleeing through the debris and chaos, she made it to the Port Authority terminal and took a bus home to Charleston to grieve with her mother. And as if the family had not suffered enough, the aging Lorna Colbert had recently endured another loss, that of her son Billy. The older brother whom Stephen acknowledged as “the joke teller” of the family was a lawyer for the U.S. Treasury Department. Stephen would always remember Billy’s love of W.C. Fields and for teaching his youngest brother to juggle. A stroke claimed William “Billy” Colbert at age forty-nine.