His attacks on greens, pinkos and people who want to destroy Christmas have won him friends across the States - and enemies in the White House. Meet Stephen Colbert, host of a satirical news show that tells it like it is - sort of. By Steven Daly
It's 11 am, in a small conference room on the west side of Manhattan, and a group of bright-eyed twentysomethings are gorging on complimentary breakfast cereal and scanning the day's news media. At the back of the conference room, a bookshelf is stacked with literature to be mined for ideas for tonight's edition of the television show they all work on: The Colbert Report, one of the most original, highly acclaimed comedic creations on American television. The title of the political tome sitting on top of the pile - Lessons for the Poor - provides a quick, accurate clue as to what kind of show this is.
The Colbert Report is news parody of the first order. The show's titular host offers a funhouse-mirror reflection of the bellicose Right-wing opinionisers of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel (among others) who dominate and dictate the political discourse in the States with lengthy and obnoxious opinion-slots that are somehow passed off as 'news'. Since this particular day happens to be Earth Day, it is Stephen Colbert's duty - his patriotic duty - to belittle the event in a similar manner. Colbert's production staff discuss the practicalities of giving the host a little balloon globe to wave at the end of a stick as he rants against America's tree-hugging contingent.
Upstairs, past various ludicrous portraits of Stephen Colbert - including an oil painting of him as Napoleon on a rearing white steed - the boss-man sits behind his desk under a framed poster for Richard Nixon's 1972 election campaign. The host of The Colbert Report (both words pronounced à la Français) is thrilled that he got show guest George McGovern, Nixon's defeated opponent, to sign the poster. 'I've always been a news junkie,' says Colbert, 44, whose formative memories include after-school television programmes such as The Munsters being interrupted by the Watergate hearings.
It's mildly disconcerting to find America's favourite faux-conservative dressed not in his trademark preppy Brooks Brothers armour, but in black T-shirt, black shorts and Hi-Tec trainers. Colbert has just driven in from his home in suburban New Jersey, where he dropped the kids off at school (he has three) before doing a session at his local gym. Still, even in his baggy gym gear, he somehow maintains the immovable Republican hair that makes him so perfect for his strident on-screen role.
It was back in 2005 that Colbert broke away from Jon Stewart's ratings-grabbing Daily Show, after eight years as Stewart's suavely buffoonish Right-wing correspondent. The Colbert Report, which airs on the same Comedy Central Network as Stewart's show, has since been three times nominated for Emmy awards; last year Colbert himself received the prestigious Peabody Award for journalistic excellence (to go with the two he won at The Daily Show). Recently, he came third in Time magazine's poll of the 100 most influential people of the year, and shortly after that he was named 'Internet Person of the Year' in the web's equivalent of the Oscars. And for a while earlier this year, thanks to a campaign by his fans, his was the first name to appear when you typed the words 'greatest living American' into Google.
While developing a spin-off based around this character, Colbert and his writers took great care in honing his on-screen persona to fit what they saw as a glaring gap in the comedy market for an obnoxious, editorialising political host just like the ones who had come to dominate the US airwaves.
'What the character expresses in specific reference to American television is the post evening-news, personality-driven, single-camera shout-fest interviews,' says Colbert. He's referring to hosts such as Fox-bred entities like Sean Hannity and Joe Scarborough, and mildly less offensive CNN presenters Lou Dobbs and Anderson Cooper among many others.
Colbert's clearest role model would be Fox News figurehead Bill O'Reilly, who takes great pride in shouting down 'unpatriotic' (dissenting) guests and occasionally having their microphones switched off mid-sentence. 'The emotion of the moment is assumed and amplified by a single voice and regurgitated back to the country at the lowest common denominator,' says Colbert. 'It can be swathed in idea, but it's essentially an emotional event. I'm regurgitating back to you how you feel about it - I am you. I am you!
'At the heart of this is America as the chosen country of God. It's a conflation of the Statue of Liberty and the crucifix: American religiosity and American destiny are one and the same. That's why George Bush was chosen by God to lead the world. Manifest destiny is an old idea, but now it's just expressed in different ways.'
The Colbert Report is a giddy, four-times-weekly celebration of the host's overweening ego and preposterous belief system; when Colbert introduces his latest guest, the luckless individual must wait on a set on the other side of the studio until the host jogs over to meet them, pumping his fists and soaking up the audience's noisy approbation.
'The odd thing about the triumphalism of the character is that it works best in an atmosphere of victimhood,' says Colbert. 'These characters say people have personal responsibility and they attack people for playing victims. But an ongoing theme with the Christian Right in the US is the "War Against Christmas". That somehow there are sinister forces - read Jews, Muslims, lesbians - that wish to destroy Christmas. It ignores the fact that Christianity is more dominant with our culture than in any other Western society. In a way, they're very much in line with language an Islamic fascist might use, talking about the decadence of the West.'
Ironically enough, the guest booked for that evening's show is Susan Jacoby, the author of The Age of American Unreason, a new book that addresses the same pathology that Colbert embodies. In his on-air role as the very embodiment of 'bullet-headed, patriotic incuriosity', he decries every aspect of Jacoby's theory with smug righteousness. For instance, she talks about the hypocrisy of Ivy Leaguers such as Clinton and Obama faking affinity for lower-class culture, and mocks the way in which 'elitism' has become a code-word used to frighten 'ordinary Americans'. Exactly, says Colbert: 'Knowing things that other people don't know is the definition of elitist!'
Offstage, Colbert explains exactly what his character trusts instead of so-called 'knowledge' and 'facts'. 'Manifest destiny and the invisible hand of the free market,' Colbert declares, easing into his television persona. 'The market will take care of poverty. I call it dribble-down economics. The rich eat everything - and don't get me wrong, I'm rich - and some of it crusts on their beard, and the poor are allowed to feed on their beard. You can't say they're not being provided for - that's class warfare.'
One notable antecedent for The Colbert Report would seem to be Chris Morris's mid-1990s series The Day Today, but although Colbert remembers seeing and enjoying part of one Morris episode, he says it had no particular influence on his current show. He also knows about Alan Partridge, but has yet to see the man in action.
Another obvious transatlantic comparison, at least in terms of Colbert's reality-warping interview technique, would be Ali G, but although Colbert Report head-writer Rich Dahm is an Ali G Show veteran, Colbert points out that there is a clear difference between the two: The Colbert Report does not ambush its interviewees. 'Everybody knows what they're in for with me,' says Colbert. 'I say exactly the same thing to everyone before the interview: "I'm not an assassin. I do the show in character - and he's an idiot; he's wilfully ignorant of everything we're going to talk about. Disabuse me of my ignorance. Don't let me put words in your mouth".'
Unlike his fulminating role-models on Fox News, Colbert's character never bullies or shouts at his guests. 'The emotion of the shouting would shut the guest down,' he observes. Perhaps it's this kinder, gentler approach that regularly leads to the remarkable sight of apparently sane guests getting sucked into the parallel universe of Colbert's famous neologism 'truthiness', that is, feelings-as-logic. On The Colbert Report one regularly sees real politicians getting so bamboozled that they can barely respond when Colbert blithely insists, 'I'm not making this up - I'm imagining it!' Or when he bellows forth the victorious non-sequitur, 'I accept your apology!' Even with guests who 'get' the joke and come to play along, Colbert has more than enough improvisational skills to keep the show afloat; there's just one thing that will kill an interview, he says, which is when the guest insists on 'dropping joke bombs'.
'There was one person who did completely shut me down,' he recalls. 'Jane Fonda. She got on my lap and nibbled on my ear. She was playing a virago, you might say; she took control with a character that was more powerful than my character at that moment. Never underestimate the power of a woman. She used her feminine wiles, albeit her septuagenarian feminine wiles - pretty impressive, I've got to say - to grab the status away from me.'
Stephen Tyrone Colbert was raised in South Carolina, the youngest of 11 children. In 1974, when he was 10, his father and two of his brothers were killed in an aeroplane crash. Colbert withdrew from his peer-group at school, and retreated into a private world, immersing himself in Tolkien books and the geek-centric role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. By his late teens, he had emerged from his shell to discover some latent desire to become a performer, briefly fronting a Stones-like cover band. 'We just played a handful of little local gigs for beer,' Colbert recalls. 'I can't remember what song we did; maybe Jumpin' Jack Flash... to be honest I was a little...' - Colbert makes the gesture of toking on a joint.
When he enrolled in college in Chicago, Colbert became involved in the famed Second City comedy-improvisation troupe. He still takes his craft extremely seriously, and he'll quote chapter and verse from the influential (and admittedly short) book Impro by Englishman Keith Johnstone.
The 'Colbert Nation', as the host calls his 'strange little group of fans', was large enough to put his book I Am America (And So Can You!) at the top of The New York Times best-seller list at the end of last year, and keep it on the list into 2008. The book is a graphics-intensive primer on Colbert's absurdly idealised vision of the States. 'It's how to be an American, and how America thinks,' says Colbert, in host mode. 'I embody America.'
The book begins with a helpful set of instructions on 'How to Read this Book,' and has chapters dealing with all aspects of American life, from the wholesome - the family, religion - to the problematic - 'Hollywood (Lights! Camera! Treason!)' and 'Race (Fact or Fiction?)' It makes for a breezy read, packed with calorie-free McNuggets of 'truthiness'. But what does Colbert the author think about his book's recent publication in Britain, a nation whose present government has a suspiciously socialist tinge?
'Anything that makes you more like America has got to be a positive thing,' he says. 'We broke off from you guys in 1776 - just in time. Since then you've spiralled; we're carrying the torch of imperial ambition for you. You guys did create an empire - so you obviously at least have the capacity to be dangerous.'
Colbert is undoubtedly a star, revered by millions. But he doesn't quite accept that. 'There's something antithetical to stardom with my character,' he says, 'because he has to seem like an underdog. You can't quite love me - I'm a little prickly.'
'A little prickly' is one of the nicer descriptions that might have been used to describe Colbert on 29 April, 2006, the evening that made him a global phenomenon. The event was the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, and he had been chosen as the keynote speaker, who is expected to administer a good-natured ribbing to members of the political elite. Colbert had other ideas: he was going to remove their ribs one by one, with no anaesthetic.
He claims that he mounted that prestigious stage unburdened by trepidation. 'I was looking forward to doing my jokes,' he says. 'They were the magic carpet I could ride over my fear. Besides, I couldn't even see anyone because of all the lights.'
In his 16 minutes in the spotlight, the man who once addressed a Hollywood audience as 'Godless sodomites' breezily delivered one vicious back-slap after another to the Bush government: 'Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the President's side and the Vice-President's side.'
He pretended to defend Bush and his well-shod junta to the audience of 2,500 Washington insiders: 'This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.' There were sideswipes at the media, as well, regarding Iraq's mythical weapons of mass destruction: 'We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out.'
The guests on the podium - including the President and his wife, Laura Bush - started off squirming and ended up scowling. As the minutes ticked away, the comedian seemed to be embracing the old adage, 'It's not funny till they all stop laughing.'
As one would expect, the mainstream American media were less than eager to highlight a jaw-dropping performance by this ungracious interloper, and of the few published accounts of Colbert's appearance, most simply dismissed his performance as not funny. George W. Bush may not have been chuckling along, says Colbert, and 'on TV it may have sounded like I was tanking, but there were 1,000 people at the back of the room laughing.' Colbert had the last laugh, as the footage of his speech became such an internet phenomenon - topping YouTube's 'most viewed list and soaring to number one on iTunes - that the press could no longer suppress it. The influential New York Times columnist Frank Rich went so far as to declare that Colbert's performance was 'the defining moment' of the United States' 2006 mid-term elections.
For all the palpable cultural impact that Colbert's work has had, he does not imagine that he's had any effect on the kind of deluded demagogues he lampoons nightly. Nor does he believe that he is having any real effect on 'the age of American unreason'. 'Making jokes doesn't always mean doing something about it,' Colbert says. 'It's doing something...'
Colbert does not need big-name guests to drive his show, but there are times when big names need him. On the eve of the recent Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, he commandeered a Philadelphia theatre for the week, telling his bosses, 'Build it and they will come.' And come they did: the final Philadelphia programme was bookended by mildly comic cameos from both leading Democratic contenders, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
As it happens, Colbert is a registered Democrat, as well as a practising Catholic - which makes it surprising that he fired off so many Pope jokes during the pontiff's recent visit to the States. 'I've earned it,' Colbert retorts. 'I go to church on Sundays; and I will continue to go if only it allows me to do Pope jokes with a clean conscience.'
Colbert bolsters his Catholic karma by teaching at a local Sunday school. 'In what I do there's not a lot of people who go to Catholic church,' he says. The children he addresses at Sunday school are too young to recognise the television star in front of them, which he is delighted about. 'So I get to actually talk to someone who will take me seriously when I talk about religion - albeit I have to find somebody who's seven to take me seriously.'
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