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By his own admission, Stephen Colbert specializes in playing "high-status idiots," a niche he refined as a venerable correspondent on The Daily Show and perfects as the host of The Colbert Report, a Daily Show spin-off that adroitly satirizes Bill O'Reilly's bullying media-age demagoguery. The Colbert Report is Colbert's fourth Comedy Central show, and his third collaboration with Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello—the trio appeared together on the sketch-comedy show Exit 57, and co-created and co-starred in the cult favorite Strangers With Candy. By the time Strangers With Candy premièred, Colbert was already contributing to The Daily Show, which has since won four Emmys and two Peabody Awards for writing.
Colbert began his professional career at Second City, where he understudied for Steve Carell; he and Carell eventually ended up writing and acting on the short-lived sketch-comedy series The Dana Carvey Show, where they voiced the Ambiguously Gay Duo, a cartoon team that eventually found a home on Saturday Night Live's TV Funhouse segment. Colbert and Carell were reunited on The Daily Show, and they later appeared together in Nora Ephron's Bewitched. Shortly after "truthiness"—which Colbert made the first "Word Of The Day" on The Colbert Report—was named "word of the year" by The American Dialect Society, and a subsequent Associated Press story neglected to credit him as the man who popularized the term, The A.V Club spoke with Colbert about Bill O'Reilly, fantasy role-playing games, and the plague of truthiness sweeping the nation.
The A.V. Club: What's your take on the "truthiness" imbroglio that's tearing our country apart?
Stephen Colbert: Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?
AVC: You're saying appearances are more important than objective truth?
SC: Absolutely. The whole idea of authority—authoritarian is fine for some people, like people who say "Listen to me, and just don't question, and do what I say, and everything will be fine"—the sort of thing we really started to respond to so well after 9/11. 'Cause we wanted someone to be daddy, to take decisions away from us. I really have a sense of [America's current leaders] doing bad things in our name to protect us, and that was okay. We weren't thrilled with Bush because we thought he was a good guy at that point, we were thrilled with him because we thought that he probably had hired people who would fuck up our enemies, regardless of how they had to do it. That was for us a very good thing, and I can't argue with the validity of that feeling.
But that has been extended to the idea that authoritarian is better than authority. Because authoritarian means there's only one authority, and that authority has got to be the President, has got to be the government, and has got to be his allies. What the right-wing in the United States tries to do is undermine the press. They call the press "liberal," they call the press "biased," not necessarily because it is or because they have problems with the facts of the left—or even because of the bias for the left, because it's hard not to be biased in some way, everyone is always going to enter their editorial opinion—but because a press that has validity is a press that has authority. And as soon as there's any authority to what the press says, you question the authority of the government—it's like the existence of another authority. So that's another part of truthiness. Truthiness is "What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true." It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.
AVC: That sort of gets to the essence of the character you play on The Colbert Report. He's appealing because he tells people how to think.
SC: "Don't worry your pretty little head. Open wide, baby bird, because poppa's got a fat nightcrawler of truth for you."
AVC: What about Bill O'Reilly and similar figures makes them so ripe for satire?
SC: Status is always ripe for satire, status is always good for comedy. And they have the highest possible status—and that's what we've tried to amplify with everything on the show. Everything on the show has my name on it, every bit of the set. One of the things I said to the set designer—who has done everything, I mean even Meet The Press, he does that level of news design—was "One of your inspirations should be [DaVinci's painting] The Last Supper." All the architecture of that room points at Jesus' head, the entire room is a halo, and he doesn't have a halo." And I said, "On the set, I'd like the lines of the set to converge on my head." And so if you look at the design, it all does, it all points at my head. And even radial lines on the floor, and on my podium, and watermarks in the images behind me, and all the vertices, are right behind my head. So there's a sort of sun-god burst quality about the set around me. And I love that. That's status.
We just try everything we can to pump up my status on the show. There are no televisions behind me, like the way [NBC Nightly News anchor] Brian Williams has, or even [Daily Show host] Jon [Stewart]. At certain angles, there are monitors behind Jon that have the world going on, which implies that that's where the news is, and that's where the information is, and the person in front of it is the conduit through which this information is given to you. But on my set, I said, "I don't want anything behind me, because I am the sun. It all comes from me. I'm not channeling anything. I am the source."
AVC: It seems like you're actively cultivating a cult of personality on the show.
SC: That's exactly what those are, these are all personality shows. It doesn't matter what they're saying. Doesn't matter what the news is, it's how this person feels about the news, and how you should feel about the news. It is also the personality. I'm not playing it nearly as hard as someone like O'Reilly or [Sean] Hannity does.
AVC: It's kind of a burlesque of that.
SC: Right. Sometimes I feel like maybe we should cut back on the burlesque, and really try to do that in a more sincere fashion, and it would really make it stronger. I find the branding that goes on in real news at times funnier than what I do. It's just so shocking to hear descriptions of [Fox Report anchor] Shepard Smith, you know: "Changing the world! He gives 110 percent!" Our problem is, there's no level of hyperbole that can be associated with me that hasn't at least been approached by the real thing.
AVC: How can you come up with satire more penetrating than the fact that O'Reilly wrote a book called The O'Reilly Factor For Kids at the same time that he was having all those problems with sexual harassment?
SC: Shamelessness is a wonderful part of the character.
AVC: There's an innate appeal to demagogues, and your show plays on that. Is it fun to be playing a character who's so insanely narcissistic? Is there any element of it that's cathartic?
SC: It's hard. It is fun, because mostly it's getting laughs. The audience seems to be responding to it, so that's the fun part. But the character can be tough, because it's hard for me to maintain the level of self-assurance that someone like O'Reilly has all the time. He was so admirable in a way when he was on Letterman, because he really was kind of unflappable. He was bigger than any venue he's in. And that's a hard thing to achieve. I'd love to be able to believe that for short periods of time. I'm afraid if I did that completely well, I'd never be able to turn it off. How great would it be to feel that great about yourself?
AVC: Do you find it constricting to have to be in character throughout the entire show?
SC: There are practical ways in which it's limiting. If something goes wrong on the show, it's not as natural to deal with it in an improvisational way than if I were just myself. If I were just myself, I could just call us on our own ineptitude. There's another layer that you have to lay on top of a mistake on my show, because the show is perfect. From our point of view, there are no mistakes. "This is good, that's a discovery. We don't have the footage? Fine, you know what? I'll just do this. I'll draw a picture of what he looks like." We did that once on the show when we didn't have the footage that we thought, so I drew a picture of the footage that I thought we had, and the graphic that I thought we had that we didn't. And those were discoveries in rehearsal, based on what I thought we had on the show. I'm not sure if I could have done that on the fly during the show. Whereas Jon is Jon, and Jon can name the moment in ways that I eventually will, but this character isn't so much in my bones that I can do it automatically now. It's also a freeing sense. Jon couldn't say on camera that he thinks Rosa Parks was overrated, because that's a hateful thing to say. But this character can get away with it, because the audience on some level knows [he doesn't] mean it.
AVC: When you interview people on the show, you're interviewing them in character. How do the guests respond to that?
SC: Some know what to do and some don't. Some people want to be faithful and kind of making fun, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I think it makes guests more nervous than they would be on another show. You go on Charlie Rose, and it's gonna be standard questioning and you can just respond, but people aren't entirely sure whether my character likes what they have to say or not. They don't know whether there's gonna be a moment of attack journalism. I try not to make it that way. I try to make it as comfortable as possible.
AVC: You were into Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, were you not?
SC: Yeah, I really was. I started playing in seventh grade, 1977. And I played incessantly, 'til probably 1981—four years.
AVC: What's the appeal?
SC: It's a fantasy role-playing game. If you're familiar with the works of Tolkien or Stephen R. Donaldson or Poul Anderson or any of the guys who wrote really good fantasy stuff, those worlds stood up. It's an opportunity to assume a persona. Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers? And you get to be heroic and have adventures. And it's an incredibly fun game. They have arcane rules and complex societies and they're open-ended and limitless, kind of like life. For somebody who eventually became an actor, it was interesting to have done that for so many years, because acting is role-playing. You assume a character, and you have to stay in them over years, and you create histories, and you apply your powers. It's good improvisation with agreed rules before you go in.
