Stephen Colbert, page 4
.
9. “Del Close Biography.” The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 10 July 2011..
10. “Stephen Colbert's Address to the Graduates.”
11. Peyser, Marc. “The Truthiness Teller; Stephen Colbert loves this country like he loves himself. Comedy Central's hot news anchor is a goofy caricature of our blustery culture. But he's starting to make sense.” Newsweek. 13 Feb. 2006: 50. General OneFile. Web. 23 July 2010.
12. Ferguson.
13. Strauss, Neil. “The Subversive Joy of Stephen Colbert. (cover story).” Rolling Stone 1087 (2009): 56. MAS Ultra School Edition. EBSCO. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.
14. “Stephen Colbert: In Good Company' On Broadway.” Fresh Air. 14 June 2011. General OneFile. Web. 19 July 2011.
Chapter 4
DAYS AND NIGHTS AT THE IMPROV
Second City has become a Chicago institution since its founding in 1959. It is one of, if not the, major training grounds for young American comedians. Its teams write and act out skits. They also polish their improvisational skills. Many of Saturday Night Live's stars have risen from Second City's ranks: John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Tina Fey. Of course there is comedy outside SNL, and Second City alumni like Alan Alda, Alan Arkin, and Joan Rivers are among its stars. The original Second City continues to attract and train incredibly funny improvisational comedians. Its young actors practice their craft in front of a live audience each night in a cabaret setting. Besides Chicago, Second City has training programs and theaters in Toronto and Hollywood. It also sends touring companies to theaters across the United States, bringing the experience of improv to people unable to travel to Second City's main stages.
Colbert was still determined to become an actor of serious roles. Much as he enjoyed the challenge of improvisational theater, for a long time he tried to avoid joining Second City's group of comedians in the making. He finally made the leap because he needed the money. He had just returned from tramping around Europe. He was working at an unfulfilling day job assembling cheap futons in the basement of the house where he was living when a friend told him about a job opening at Second City's ticket counter and gift shop. It wasn't quite a commitment to comedy, more answering telephones and selling souvenirs, and Colbert took it. For a long time, he held Second City's record for the most T-shirts sold in a single night.1 And slowly, his fellow actors drew him away from the souvenir counter and onto the stage.
Colbert was hired at Second City on the same day as Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and the late Chris Farley (later of SNL), and they were immediately expected to work together as members of the touring company. Colbert would also serve as understudy to another comedian who would reappear in Colbert's life years later: a guy named Steve Carell.
Colbert's new mates were not quite sure what to make of the quiet, Hamlet-esque young actor in their midst. Sedaris and Colbert had things in common; for instance, although she had been born in New York State, she'd been raised a southern girl in North Carolina, in a fairly large family of five children. Comedy runs in the Sedaris family blood; Amy's older brother is bestselling humor author David Sedaris. Dinello, also from a family of five children, was an Illinois native. He and Sedaris were a romantic couple. For a while, unfortunately, it did not look as if the team would work well together. Sedaris recalls that Colbert took himself far too seriously at first: “I made him laugh onstage once, and he was so mad at me. He went and closed himself in a closet or a bathroom. He was serious and seemed a little aloof, but once we broke him onstage, he just got sillier and a lot more fun.”2 Dinello thought Colbert “was pretentious and sort of cold.” In turn, Colbert considered Dinello “just an illiterate thug Xa Neanderthal.” He adds, “Amy likes to say we were both right.' Six months later he was my best friend.” Dinello was best man when Colbert got married and continues to appear occasionally on The Colbert Report as Tad, the building manager.3
It took time for Colbert's comic secret to reveal itself. But as he and his castmates tossed about lines and performed pratfalls onstage, the serious shell fell away and the high school class clown a funny, even silly, Colbert came to life.
Several times, Colbert had second thoughts about his future in comedy and left the company to pursue serious acting. Each time, Sedaris and Dinello were instrumental in convincing him to return. He finally realized that making people laugh was his true calling when he watched an actress metaphorically crash and burn as she performed a comedy routine. She was playing a coffeehouse singer about to perform a song for the whales. But as she began the routine, she forgot to include that bit of information; she just launched into a weird series of whistles, clicks, and moans. Suddenly realizing her mistake, she stopped and announced, “Oh, this is for the whales!” As they watched the disaster unfold from backstage, Colbert and his friends began laughing hysterically not at the actress in the middle of her truly abysmal performance, but more at the ludicrousness of the whole situation. Afterward, Colbert realized that this kind of joyful camaraderie would not exist in serious theater. Genuinely terrible comedy can be so bad, it's funny but it would be funny either way. In drama, bad acting can also be so bad it's funny but in that case, it is unintentional and inappropriate. Backstage during a serious actor's miserable delivery, there might be grimaces, quietly mournful commiseration, consolation, even a bit of despair, and perhaps a little bit of superior gloating but there would never be hysterical, shared laughter. Colbert chose comedy and has stayed on that track, for the most part, ever since.4
Sometimes Dinello and Colbert separated from the rest of their Second City teammates for hilarious comedy club routines of their own. An appearance at one venue, Stella, involved, of all things, bassoons. The two men had talked about a musical sketch based on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” a fast-paced country classic that describes a truly heated fiddle contest against Lucifer himself. Both Colbert and Dinello played the guitar to some extent, but just being bad guitarists didn't seem funny enough. Bassoons, however bassoons could be seriously funny (as even Mozart knew well). And neither Colbert nor Dinello had ever even held one before. They went to a music store, rented two bassoons, arrived at Stella with instruments in hand, and performed the routine. First, they tuned up by looking down the instruments, holding them like bazooka guns, tapping on the bells, sensuously licking the reeds, fiddling with the valves. After several minutes devoted to an extended mock tune-up, they began stomping their feet in time and spoke-sang the opening lines of the song, changing the fiddle lyrics to references to bassoons. The audience sounds wild with anticipation for the bassoon contest itself and both Colbert and Dinello make a valiant effort to get a sound any sound out of their instruments. It wouldn't be quite as funny if they weren't both obviously trying so hard! The tuneless result that fizzles out of the two woodwinds sounds like something between a fart and a kazoo toot. Occasionally cracking up, the two musicians soldier on to the end of the song as the rest of the band finally comes to their rescue.5
But all was not fun and games for Colbert. He now had strong motivation to establish a career rather than just find a job. In 1990, while attending the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, he met Evelyn McGee. The two had a lot in common: McGee, also a native of South Carolina, was trained as an actress as well. Ironically, as a child she had lived just a couple of blocks away from her future husband, but their paths had never crossed. Just as ironically, she knew comedian Jon Stewart before Colbert did; she had seen some of Jon Stuart Leibowitz's stand-up comedy shows in New York. Before long, Colbert and McGee married and began planning a family.
Second City is an important step for comedians on their way to the top, whether that be Saturday Night Live, the Comedy Central network, films, or the stand-up circuit. It is also a place for writers and actors to meet and network. Sedaris saw in Colbert a kindred spirit of sorts; they knew they could work together outside the confines of Second City and produce some funny material. Joining up once again with Dinello, they pitched a television show called Exit 57 to New York City based Comedy Central. Consisting of a series of weird skits about five young coworkers, it only ran from 1995 to 1996, but it gave the team valuable experience. And in its brief life of just 12 half-hour episodes, it also garnered some CableACE Award nominations for Best Comedy Series, Best Performing, and Best Writing. (The now defunct Award for Cable Excellence was given annually from 1978 to 1997.) Those talented writers, of course, included Colbert. But the show's cancellation came at a bad time: Stephen and Evelyn Colbert's first child, Madeline, had just been born.6
Another comedy project had an even shorter life. The Dana Carvey Show, a sketch program, ran for only seven episodes. Nevertheless, its creators included Colbert, plus Second City alum and future Daily Show co-correspondent Carell and comic actor Robert Smigel.
Smigel had another opportunity to team up with Colbert. There are very few improvisational comedians who do not find themselves involved with SNL at some point in their careers, and Colbert is no exception for a very short time he was one of its stable of writers. Together with J. J. Seidelmaier, Smigel produced a series of short animated sketches about a pair of superheroes, Ace and Gary. The sketches first ran on The Dana Carvey Show but were quickly snatched up by SNL. The running gag throughout the series is the unanswered question of whether the dynamic duo is or is not gay thus the sobriquet “The Ambiguously Gay Duo.” Ace was voiced by Colbert; Gary, by Carell. After a four-year hiatus, the sketch returned to SNL in an episode that saw the superheroes turned from cartoon characters to flesh-and-blood actors.
In the midst of his comedy activities, an unexpected noncomedic, noncable, network television opportunity opened up for Colbert. ABC's morning light news program Good Morning, America hired him as one of its correspondents. He was going to be involved in reporting real news, though the stories he was assigned were on the humorous human interest side rather than headlines. Colbert took the assignment because “I really needed a job. I was just doing pick-up work in the New York City area” not the best situation for a young man with a growing family.7 But yet again, the job failed to lead to a career for the aspiring actor/comedian. He filmed two stories, but only one was ever broadcast. The segment that made it to the small screen was about a Rube Goldberg contraption competition. Throughout his three-minute coverage, Colbert could not restrain himself from the occasional bit of snarky though perceptive sarcasm. It was supposed to be, more or less, a straight piece. It ends up looking like something out of The Colbert Report. “They hated me,” Colbert said of the experience. “I wanted to do satire, and they wanted someone to be funny like the weatherman was funny.”8 Again, Colbert moved on.
News shows, real and otherwise, had their eye on Colbert. He was tapped to work on Comedy Central's fake news program, The Daily Show. The producers lured him on board by telling him that he was “genetically engineered for the show.”9 For Colbert, it was a job, but not one he was enthusiastic about. “I did not believe in the show, I did not watch the show, and they paid dirt. It was literally just sort of it was just a paycheck to show up.”10
At that time, the host of The Daily Show was Craig Kilborn. Kilborn had primarily worked as a sportscaster prior to his arrival on the Comedy Central scene. The new program and its host received some critical acclaim. But The Daily Show was still in search of its stride, and it was far from the hit it would soon become with a new host. In the six months that he worked alongside Kilborn as “The New Guy,”11 Colbert continued to look for a different, more fulfilling outlet for his unique brand of creativity.
Colbert returned yet again to his old Second City friends Sedaris and Dinello. Sedaris wanted to mine the comedic potential in the after-school special television genre.12 Like the problem novels being written for teenagers at the time, after-school specials were melodramatic movies focused on a particular teen issue drug abuse, pregnancy, running away; they were usually aired in the late afternoon, when kids were coming home from school and plopping down in front of the television to recharge. From this concept, the three writers developed the idea for a new Comedy Central sitcom: Strangers with Candy. The premise was a quirky one ripe with comic possibilities. Jerri Blank, a woman in her 40s who had dropped out of high school and gone on to a life of drug abuse and prostitution, among other crimes, suddenly appears back in a freshman class, determined to graduate this time. On the show, Colbert played a gay teacher who was in the closet although everyone in the school was aware of his sexual orientation; Dinello played his partner, the art teacher. The series drew enough of a small but dedicated cult audience to spawn a motion picture. The show ended its run in 2000, and once again Colbert was looking for a worthy vehicle for his talents.
Stephen Colbert reunites with Second City partners in crime Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris for the opening of Strangers with Candy, the film spinoff of their Comedy Central television series.
(AP Photo/Stephen Chernin)
Colbert's big opportunity came with a return to a job that had not worked out too well in the past.
NOTES
1. Plys, Cate. “The Real Stephen Colbert: Northwestern Magazine Northwestern University.” Home: Northwestern University. Web. 10 December 2010..
2. Peyser, Marc. “The Truthiness Teller; Stephen Colbert loves this country like he loves himself. Comedy Central's hot news anchor is a goofy caricature of our blustery culture. But he's starting to make sense.” Newsweek. 13 Feb. 2006: 50. General OneFile. Web. 23 July 2010.
3. “Paul Dinello Dot Net: Biography.” Paul Dinello Dot Net: a Comprehensive Fansite. Web. 23 July 2011..
4. Plys.
5. “Colbert Dinello Stella YouTube.” YouTube Broadcast Yourself. Web. 23 July 2011..
6. Edwards, Gavin. “Colbert Country.” Rolling Stone 986 (2005): 68. MAS Ultra School Edition. EBSCO. Web. 16 Oct. 2011.
7. Gross, Terry. “A Fake Newsman's Fake Newsman: Stephen Colbert: NPR.” NPR: National Public Radio: News & Analysis, World, US, Music & Arts: NPR. 24 Jan. 2005. Web. 28 Aug. 2011..
8. Edwards.
9. Edwards.
10. P., Ken. “IGN: An Interview with Stephen Colbert.” IGN Movies: Trailers, Movie Reviews, Pictures, Celebrities, and Interviews. 11 Aug. 2003. Web. 12 Oct. 2011..
11. “Stephen Colbert TV.com.” TV.com Free Full Episodes & Clips, Show Info and TV Listings Guide. Web. 08 Aug. 2011..
12. Gross.
Chapter 5
THE DAILY SHOW
In 1999, The Daily Show had a new host. Craig Kilborn was gone, chosen to replace Tom Snyder on NBC's The Late Late Show. In the anchor's chair was Jon Stewart, an actor and stand-up comedian who had developed a popular but short-lived talk show, The Jon Stewart Show, on MTV a few years earlier. Stewart's brand of comedy was quite different from Kilborn's, and the entire feel of the show began to change. Kilborn had focused on silly stories or bad performances by news anchors at small town network television affiliates. Stewart was funny, but he was also incredibly intelligent and well-read. More and more, the show approached real news stories, particularly politics, from the perspective of satire. Stewart and the show's writers monopolized on the many inconsistencies, ambiguities, and unlikely coincidences the viewers of mainstream news could easily overlook. As Entertainment Weekly phrased it in an interview with Stewart and Colbert, “Your shows are some of the only ones out there actually digging into archival video to prove when politicians are lying or contradicting themselves.”1 Stewart tackled sensitive topics, from presidential campaigns to 9/11 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became possible for people who watched The Daily Show to get solid information about the latest news just from a very slanted, very liberal, bitingly critical, and searingly funny point of view. Under Stewart, the show became a hit, eventually claiming an average of two million viewers a night.
As a literary form, satire has been around for a very long time since the heyday of fourth-century b.c. playwrights like Aristophanes. Satire involves exposing and ridiculing human vices, or some of the more absurd, illogical, and nonsensical things people especially people in the public eye do, in a manner that is supposed to be humorous. Satire works with two conflicting layers of meaning. One layer is direct, or explicit; the audience can assume the satirist really means what he is saying. The other is indirect, or implicit; it could be that the satirist means the exact opposite of what he is saying. Satire is intended to make the audience think critically while they are laughing. And, because those two layers of meaning can get tricky and confusing, it is most successful when the audience is already familiar with the issue under attack; otherwise the humor would be lost on the readers or listeners.
Satire can approach its subject in a number of different ways. For instance, it can be ironic, pointing out incongruities between what a person says and what he or she does. It can be sarcastic, going beyond highlighting ironic inconsistencies to the point of attacking them savagely, with witty, abrasive, cutting plays on words.
Satire uses some standard tools to achieve its goal. Caricature, for instance, exaggerates some noticeable feature of the subject. Editorial and political cartoons make great use of caricature, emphasizing an overweight politician's girth, or a celebrity's nose or teeth or big hair. In a television satire, a caricaturist could highlight someone's unusual speech pattern, or a phrase he keeps repeating, or the way she walks or dresses, drawing attention to that trait until it is seen as funny. Similar to caricature is burlesque, which has more to do with the inappropriate degree of seriousness with which a subject is treated. In a burlesque comedy sketch, a serious topic can be handled in a cute, silly, or lighthearted manner. Or something completely inconsequential can be dealt with in utter, inappropriate seriousness. Travesty is another tool of satire, closely related to burlesque. It means taking something serious and treating or recreating it in an offensively flippant way. Sometimes you hear the term travesty of justice, which means that something so ludicrous has occurred at a courtroom proceeding, it seems more like a mockery than a real trial.
9. “Del Close Biography.” The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 10 July 2011.
10. “Stephen Colbert's Address to the Graduates.”
11. Peyser, Marc. “The Truthiness Teller; Stephen Colbert loves this country like he loves himself. Comedy Central's hot news anchor is a goofy caricature of our blustery culture. But he's starting to make sense.” Newsweek. 13 Feb. 2006: 50. General OneFile. Web. 23 July 2010.
12. Ferguson.
13. Strauss, Neil. “The Subversive Joy of Stephen Colbert. (cover story).” Rolling Stone 1087 (2009): 56. MAS Ultra School Edition. EBSCO. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.
14. “Stephen Colbert: In Good Company' On Broadway.” Fresh Air. 14 June 2011. General OneFile. Web. 19 July 2011.
Chapter 4
DAYS AND NIGHTS AT THE IMPROV
Second City has become a Chicago institution since its founding in 1959. It is one of, if not the, major training grounds for young American comedians. Its teams write and act out skits. They also polish their improvisational skills. Many of Saturday Night Live's stars have risen from Second City's ranks: John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Tina Fey. Of course there is comedy outside SNL, and Second City alumni like Alan Alda, Alan Arkin, and Joan Rivers are among its stars. The original Second City continues to attract and train incredibly funny improvisational comedians. Its young actors practice their craft in front of a live audience each night in a cabaret setting. Besides Chicago, Second City has training programs and theaters in Toronto and Hollywood. It also sends touring companies to theaters across the United States, bringing the experience of improv to people unable to travel to Second City's main stages.
Colbert was still determined to become an actor of serious roles. Much as he enjoyed the challenge of improvisational theater, for a long time he tried to avoid joining Second City's group of comedians in the making. He finally made the leap because he needed the money. He had just returned from tramping around Europe. He was working at an unfulfilling day job assembling cheap futons in the basement of the house where he was living when a friend told him about a job opening at Second City's ticket counter and gift shop. It wasn't quite a commitment to comedy, more answering telephones and selling souvenirs, and Colbert took it. For a long time, he held Second City's record for the most T-shirts sold in a single night.1 And slowly, his fellow actors drew him away from the souvenir counter and onto the stage.
Colbert was hired at Second City on the same day as Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and the late Chris Farley (later of SNL), and they were immediately expected to work together as members of the touring company. Colbert would also serve as understudy to another comedian who would reappear in Colbert's life years later: a guy named Steve Carell.
Colbert's new mates were not quite sure what to make of the quiet, Hamlet-esque young actor in their midst. Sedaris and Colbert had things in common; for instance, although she had been born in New York State, she'd been raised a southern girl in North Carolina, in a fairly large family of five children. Comedy runs in the Sedaris family blood; Amy's older brother is bestselling humor author David Sedaris. Dinello, also from a family of five children, was an Illinois native. He and Sedaris were a romantic couple. For a while, unfortunately, it did not look as if the team would work well together. Sedaris recalls that Colbert took himself far too seriously at first: “I made him laugh onstage once, and he was so mad at me. He went and closed himself in a closet or a bathroom. He was serious and seemed a little aloof, but once we broke him onstage, he just got sillier and a lot more fun.”2 Dinello thought Colbert “was pretentious and sort of cold.” In turn, Colbert considered Dinello “just an illiterate thug Xa Neanderthal.” He adds, “Amy likes to say we were both right.' Six months later he was my best friend.” Dinello was best man when Colbert got married and continues to appear occasionally on The Colbert Report as Tad, the building manager.3
It took time for Colbert's comic secret to reveal itself. But as he and his castmates tossed about lines and performed pratfalls onstage, the serious shell fell away and the high school class clown a funny, even silly, Colbert came to life.
Several times, Colbert had second thoughts about his future in comedy and left the company to pursue serious acting. Each time, Sedaris and Dinello were instrumental in convincing him to return. He finally realized that making people laugh was his true calling when he watched an actress metaphorically crash and burn as she performed a comedy routine. She was playing a coffeehouse singer about to perform a song for the whales. But as she began the routine, she forgot to include that bit of information; she just launched into a weird series of whistles, clicks, and moans. Suddenly realizing her mistake, she stopped and announced, “Oh, this is for the whales!” As they watched the disaster unfold from backstage, Colbert and his friends began laughing hysterically not at the actress in the middle of her truly abysmal performance, but more at the ludicrousness of the whole situation. Afterward, Colbert realized that this kind of joyful camaraderie would not exist in serious theater. Genuinely terrible comedy can be so bad, it's funny but it would be funny either way. In drama, bad acting can also be so bad it's funny but in that case, it is unintentional and inappropriate. Backstage during a serious actor's miserable delivery, there might be grimaces, quietly mournful commiseration, consolation, even a bit of despair, and perhaps a little bit of superior gloating but there would never be hysterical, shared laughter. Colbert chose comedy and has stayed on that track, for the most part, ever since.4
Sometimes Dinello and Colbert separated from the rest of their Second City teammates for hilarious comedy club routines of their own. An appearance at one venue, Stella, involved, of all things, bassoons. The two men had talked about a musical sketch based on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” a fast-paced country classic that describes a truly heated fiddle contest against Lucifer himself. Both Colbert and Dinello played the guitar to some extent, but just being bad guitarists didn't seem funny enough. Bassoons, however bassoons could be seriously funny (as even Mozart knew well). And neither Colbert nor Dinello had ever even held one before. They went to a music store, rented two bassoons, arrived at Stella with instruments in hand, and performed the routine. First, they tuned up by looking down the instruments, holding them like bazooka guns, tapping on the bells, sensuously licking the reeds, fiddling with the valves. After several minutes devoted to an extended mock tune-up, they began stomping their feet in time and spoke-sang the opening lines of the song, changing the fiddle lyrics to references to bassoons. The audience sounds wild with anticipation for the bassoon contest itself and both Colbert and Dinello make a valiant effort to get a sound any sound out of their instruments. It wouldn't be quite as funny if they weren't both obviously trying so hard! The tuneless result that fizzles out of the two woodwinds sounds like something between a fart and a kazoo toot. Occasionally cracking up, the two musicians soldier on to the end of the song as the rest of the band finally comes to their rescue.5
But all was not fun and games for Colbert. He now had strong motivation to establish a career rather than just find a job. In 1990, while attending the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, he met Evelyn McGee. The two had a lot in common: McGee, also a native of South Carolina, was trained as an actress as well. Ironically, as a child she had lived just a couple of blocks away from her future husband, but their paths had never crossed. Just as ironically, she knew comedian Jon Stewart before Colbert did; she had seen some of Jon Stuart Leibowitz's stand-up comedy shows in New York. Before long, Colbert and McGee married and began planning a family.
Second City is an important step for comedians on their way to the top, whether that be Saturday Night Live, the Comedy Central network, films, or the stand-up circuit. It is also a place for writers and actors to meet and network. Sedaris saw in Colbert a kindred spirit of sorts; they knew they could work together outside the confines of Second City and produce some funny material. Joining up once again with Dinello, they pitched a television show called Exit 57 to New York City based Comedy Central. Consisting of a series of weird skits about five young coworkers, it only ran from 1995 to 1996, but it gave the team valuable experience. And in its brief life of just 12 half-hour episodes, it also garnered some CableACE Award nominations for Best Comedy Series, Best Performing, and Best Writing. (The now defunct Award for Cable Excellence was given annually from 1978 to 1997.) Those talented writers, of course, included Colbert. But the show's cancellation came at a bad time: Stephen and Evelyn Colbert's first child, Madeline, had just been born.6
Another comedy project had an even shorter life. The Dana Carvey Show, a sketch program, ran for only seven episodes. Nevertheless, its creators included Colbert, plus Second City alum and future Daily Show co-correspondent Carell and comic actor Robert Smigel.
Smigel had another opportunity to team up with Colbert. There are very few improvisational comedians who do not find themselves involved with SNL at some point in their careers, and Colbert is no exception for a very short time he was one of its stable of writers. Together with J. J. Seidelmaier, Smigel produced a series of short animated sketches about a pair of superheroes, Ace and Gary. The sketches first ran on The Dana Carvey Show but were quickly snatched up by SNL. The running gag throughout the series is the unanswered question of whether the dynamic duo is or is not gay thus the sobriquet “The Ambiguously Gay Duo.” Ace was voiced by Colbert; Gary, by Carell. After a four-year hiatus, the sketch returned to SNL in an episode that saw the superheroes turned from cartoon characters to flesh-and-blood actors.
In the midst of his comedy activities, an unexpected noncomedic, noncable, network television opportunity opened up for Colbert. ABC's morning light news program Good Morning, America hired him as one of its correspondents. He was going to be involved in reporting real news, though the stories he was assigned were on the humorous human interest side rather than headlines. Colbert took the assignment because “I really needed a job. I was just doing pick-up work in the New York City area” not the best situation for a young man with a growing family.7 But yet again, the job failed to lead to a career for the aspiring actor/comedian. He filmed two stories, but only one was ever broadcast. The segment that made it to the small screen was about a Rube Goldberg contraption competition. Throughout his three-minute coverage, Colbert could not restrain himself from the occasional bit of snarky though perceptive sarcasm. It was supposed to be, more or less, a straight piece. It ends up looking like something out of The Colbert Report. “They hated me,” Colbert said of the experience. “I wanted to do satire, and they wanted someone to be funny like the weatherman was funny.”8 Again, Colbert moved on.
News shows, real and otherwise, had their eye on Colbert. He was tapped to work on Comedy Central's fake news program, The Daily Show. The producers lured him on board by telling him that he was “genetically engineered for the show.”9 For Colbert, it was a job, but not one he was enthusiastic about. “I did not believe in the show, I did not watch the show, and they paid dirt. It was literally just sort of it was just a paycheck to show up.”10
At that time, the host of The Daily Show was Craig Kilborn. Kilborn had primarily worked as a sportscaster prior to his arrival on the Comedy Central scene. The new program and its host received some critical acclaim. But The Daily Show was still in search of its stride, and it was far from the hit it would soon become with a new host. In the six months that he worked alongside Kilborn as “The New Guy,”11 Colbert continued to look for a different, more fulfilling outlet for his unique brand of creativity.
Colbert returned yet again to his old Second City friends Sedaris and Dinello. Sedaris wanted to mine the comedic potential in the after-school special television genre.12 Like the problem novels being written for teenagers at the time, after-school specials were melodramatic movies focused on a particular teen issue drug abuse, pregnancy, running away; they were usually aired in the late afternoon, when kids were coming home from school and plopping down in front of the television to recharge. From this concept, the three writers developed the idea for a new Comedy Central sitcom: Strangers with Candy. The premise was a quirky one ripe with comic possibilities. Jerri Blank, a woman in her 40s who had dropped out of high school and gone on to a life of drug abuse and prostitution, among other crimes, suddenly appears back in a freshman class, determined to graduate this time. On the show, Colbert played a gay teacher who was in the closet although everyone in the school was aware of his sexual orientation; Dinello played his partner, the art teacher. The series drew enough of a small but dedicated cult audience to spawn a motion picture. The show ended its run in 2000, and once again Colbert was looking for a worthy vehicle for his talents.
Stephen Colbert reunites with Second City partners in crime Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris for the opening of Strangers with Candy, the film spinoff of their Comedy Central television series.
(AP Photo/Stephen Chernin)
Colbert's big opportunity came with a return to a job that had not worked out too well in the past.
NOTES
1. Plys, Cate. “The Real Stephen Colbert: Northwestern Magazine Northwestern University.” Home: Northwestern University. Web. 10 December 2010.
2. Peyser, Marc. “The Truthiness Teller; Stephen Colbert loves this country like he loves himself. Comedy Central's hot news anchor is a goofy caricature of our blustery culture. But he's starting to make sense.” Newsweek. 13 Feb. 2006: 50. General OneFile. Web. 23 July 2010.
3. “Paul Dinello Dot Net: Biography.” Paul Dinello Dot Net: a Comprehensive Fansite. Web. 23 July 2011.
4. Plys.
5. “Colbert Dinello Stella YouTube.” YouTube Broadcast Yourself. Web. 23 July 2011.
6. Edwards, Gavin. “Colbert Country.” Rolling Stone 986 (2005): 68. MAS Ultra School Edition. EBSCO. Web. 16 Oct. 2011.
7. Gross, Terry. “A Fake Newsman's Fake Newsman: Stephen Colbert: NPR.” NPR: National Public Radio: News & Analysis, World, US, Music & Arts: NPR. 24 Jan. 2005. Web. 28 Aug. 2011.
8. Edwards.
9. Edwards.
10. P., Ken. “IGN: An Interview with Stephen Colbert.” IGN Movies: Trailers, Movie Reviews, Pictures, Celebrities, and Interviews. 11 Aug. 2003. Web. 12 Oct. 2011.
11. “Stephen Colbert TV.com.” TV.com Free Full Episodes & Clips, Show Info and TV Listings Guide. Web. 08 Aug. 2011.
12. Gross.
Chapter 5
THE DAILY SHOW
In 1999, The Daily Show had a new host. Craig Kilborn was gone, chosen to replace Tom Snyder on NBC's The Late Late Show. In the anchor's chair was Jon Stewart, an actor and stand-up comedian who had developed a popular but short-lived talk show, The Jon Stewart Show, on MTV a few years earlier. Stewart's brand of comedy was quite different from Kilborn's, and the entire feel of the show began to change. Kilborn had focused on silly stories or bad performances by news anchors at small town network television affiliates. Stewart was funny, but he was also incredibly intelligent and well-read. More and more, the show approached real news stories, particularly politics, from the perspective of satire. Stewart and the show's writers monopolized on the many inconsistencies, ambiguities, and unlikely coincidences the viewers of mainstream news could easily overlook. As Entertainment Weekly phrased it in an interview with Stewart and Colbert, “Your shows are some of the only ones out there actually digging into archival video to prove when politicians are lying or contradicting themselves.”1 Stewart tackled sensitive topics, from presidential campaigns to 9/11 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became possible for people who watched The Daily Show to get solid information about the latest news just from a very slanted, very liberal, bitingly critical, and searingly funny point of view. Under Stewart, the show became a hit, eventually claiming an average of two million viewers a night.
As a literary form, satire has been around for a very long time since the heyday of fourth-century b.c. playwrights like Aristophanes. Satire involves exposing and ridiculing human vices, or some of the more absurd, illogical, and nonsensical things people especially people in the public eye do, in a manner that is supposed to be humorous. Satire works with two conflicting layers of meaning. One layer is direct, or explicit; the audience can assume the satirist really means what he is saying. The other is indirect, or implicit; it could be that the satirist means the exact opposite of what he is saying. Satire is intended to make the audience think critically while they are laughing. And, because those two layers of meaning can get tricky and confusing, it is most successful when the audience is already familiar with the issue under attack; otherwise the humor would be lost on the readers or listeners.
Satire can approach its subject in a number of different ways. For instance, it can be ironic, pointing out incongruities between what a person says and what he or she does. It can be sarcastic, going beyond highlighting ironic inconsistencies to the point of attacking them savagely, with witty, abrasive, cutting plays on words.
Satire uses some standard tools to achieve its goal. Caricature, for instance, exaggerates some noticeable feature of the subject. Editorial and political cartoons make great use of caricature, emphasizing an overweight politician's girth, or a celebrity's nose or teeth or big hair. In a television satire, a caricaturist could highlight someone's unusual speech pattern, or a phrase he keeps repeating, or the way she walks or dresses, drawing attention to that trait until it is seen as funny. Similar to caricature is burlesque, which has more to do with the inappropriate degree of seriousness with which a subject is treated. In a burlesque comedy sketch, a serious topic can be handled in a cute, silly, or lighthearted manner. Or something completely inconsequential can be dealt with in utter, inappropriate seriousness. Travesty is another tool of satire, closely related to burlesque. It means taking something serious and treating or recreating it in an offensively flippant way. Sometimes you hear the term travesty of justice, which means that something so ludicrous has occurred at a courtroom proceeding, it seems more like a mockery than a real trial.
