 Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times "I don't have to pretend to be impartial. I'm partial. I'll make fun of anybody." |
Covering the Convention for Laughs By ROBIN FINN The celebrity aura is beyond palpable. Right here, plastered to the door of the second-floor men's room at 513 West 54th Street, the studio/headquarters for Comedy Central's Emmy-winning "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," is a blue star with Stephen Colbert's name on it. Mr. Colbert, an alumnus of the Second City comedy troupe who pretends to
brag about his status as the show's senior correspondent, once used this men's room as a prop
for a skit called "How to Be a Correspondent." The lavatory was his dressing room. A few years
later, the star remains as testimony to his, ah, comedic stamina. When you are a
correspondent for a newscast that advertises itself - on a gigantic billboard adjacent to one
for Fox News just across 34th Street from Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican
National Convention - as "the most trusted name in fake news," hanging your star on the men's
room seems logical enough. Mr. Colbert, who deems the campaign trail one big snooze fest,
covered (sort of) the Democratic convention last month and pledges to give next week's
Republican convocation in Manhattan fair and equal treatment. It's a balance thing. "
The conventions are like industrials - they're sales rallies where politicians say things
people have already heard to people who already believe them," he says. Ferreting out the
hypocrisy in both conventions is easy pickings. "I have the luxury of not being a real
reporter, and in fact, I'm not even a pundit," admits Mr. Colbert, whose actual dressing room/
office is a shrine to all things "Lord of the Rings," including a Gandalf for President button
and an animated cave troll that serves as arbiter of his writing sessions with fellow "Daily
Show" parodists. If an idea is funny, the troll raises a trident. If a gag falls flat,
it lowers a mace and grunts. Mr. Colbert doesn't trust his own judgment. "I always love all of
the ideas," he says, giving the troll a peck on its ugly cheek. When Mr. Colbert - who
relinquished his adolescent dream of being, not just playing, Hamlet to write and perform
improvisational comedy - turned 40 recently, one of his gifts was a Lettermanesque list, the
Top 10 Reasons Why Stephen Colbert Is Secretly a Republican. It is, he says, why he will
blend in nicely at the convention. His fondness for navy-blue blazers, button-down shirts,
khakis, the suburbs (he, the wife and three children live in New Jersey) and church every
Sunday figure prominently. On his wall is a 1972 Nixon campaign poster that, he says,
represents the awakening of his political consciousness. "That's when I became aware of the
abuse of power," he says. "I became a true believer. I'm the last of 11 kids; my brothers and
sisters, with just two exceptions, are all Republicans, and they always used to say to me, 'Why
are you such a pinko?' '' What he really is, behind the facade of Stephen Colbert, faux
correspondent, is a liberal in conservative's clothing. He is, he says, way too square to be
hip, way too well informed about politics to be anything but skeptical in private and,
hopefully, nothing but funny on the air. "I don't have to pretend to be impartial," he
says. "I'm partial. I'll make fun of anybody. I wish we had an effect on the way people think
about politics, but I don't think we do. I see the show as a relief from the political process,
especially now, when so much of politics is built on the idea of fear. We're about falling down
and going boom on camera." He does, however, have one earnest convention agenda,
provided he wangles sufficient access: "We want to find out actual information about
Republicans. We want to know where the pods are, where they're grown, and we want to photograph
them before they're harvested." Just kidding. Can a guy who displays a bottle of
Screaming Sphincter cayenne pepper sauce beside his velvet "swooning couch," who writes and
stars in the just-completed film version of "Strangers with Candy," the Comedy Central series
he wrote with Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, and who performs the voice of Ace on "The
Ambiguously Gay Duo" cartoon that he and Robert Smigel invented for "Saturday Night Live," be
anything but a kidder? MR. COLBERT grew up in Charleston, S.C., in what he calls a "
humorocracy where the funniest person in the room is king." Dad was a doctor of immunology; Mom
was an aspiring actress whose stage career was doomed by her 11 pregnancies. Mr. Colbert's
thespian aspirations had her full blessing. After two years in Virginia at Hampden-
Sydney College, which he recalls as "an inorganic rock of ultraconservatism," he switched to
Northwestern's theater program, and came under the sway of the improvisational guru Del Close.
He auditioned for and was accepted by Second City, where he met Ms. Sedaris and Mr.
Dinello, who are still his writing partners. Initially he was part of the Second City touring
company, then was promoted to company resident in 1989 and remained there five years before
decamping, with Ms. Sedaris and Mr. Dinello, to develop "Exit 57" for HBO Downtown Productions.
He was a writer and performer on "The Dana Carvey Show," which lasted just eight
episodes, flunked a two-report tryout with "Good Morning America" as a field correspondent and
was mainly unemployed in New York City in 1996 and 1997, an unfunny experience that causes him
to overextend himself these days. "I work all the time," he says, "mainly out of fear
that the day will come when I can't think of anything funny." © 2004 — NYTimes.com
Published: August 27, 2004