Since last winter, after laying to rest the blowhard host of The Colbert Report and inheriting Letterman’s seat on The Late Show, the most inventive comic of his generation has been consumed with one very large question: Who will he be now? Stephen Colbert—the real one—gives a sneak peek. And in revealing his truest self (and boy, does he go deep), he shows us how he might just reinvent late-night, too
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t was early July, about nine weeks before the debut of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and we were sitting in his temporary office above a BMW dealership on the far west side of Manhattan. He looked very tired, and he was apologizing (unnecessarily) for rambling on in a way that was maybe a little uncomfortably overemotional. “I didn't leave the studio until 2 A.M. last night,” he said. “Didn't get to bed until three, and I've been traveling and just got here—.”
t was early July, about nine weeks before the debut of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and we were sitting in his temporary office above a BMW dealership on the far west side of Manhattan. He looked very tired, and he was apologizing (unnecessarily) for rambling on in a way that was maybe a little uncomfortably overemotional. “I didn't leave the studio until 2 A.M. last night,” he said. “Didn't get to bed until three, and I've been traveling and just got here—.”
He'd been up late doing a strange stunt the night before, stepping in unannounced as host of Only in Monroe, a local public-access program in Monroe, Michigan, about forty miles south of Detroit. There was all sorts of pressure on their first show, he said. “First show! First show! Well, fuck the first show. There's going to be 202 this year—how do you do a first one? So I just wanted to go do a show someplace. And now we've done it.”
The idea was to do Only in Monroe more or less as it always is—same production values, same set and graphics and crew—just a ton more jokes. His first guests were the show's regular hosts, Michelle Bowman and (former Miss America) Kaye Lani Rae Rafko Wilson. (Colbert on-air: “I'm not sure how many people that is.”) He did Monroe news and the Monroe calendar, and about twenty minutes in, he brought out his next guest, “a local Michigander who is making a name for himself in the competitive world of music, Marshall Mathers.”
SEE MORE: How To Suit Up Like Stephen Colbert
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We were talking about the logistics involved in pulling off something like this, and how great it felt for him to be improvising in front of a camera again, and the curious tensions that popped up in his interview with Eminem. And then we got onto the subject of discomfort and disorientation, and the urge he has to seek out those feelings, and from there it was a quick jump to the nature of suffering. Before long we were sitting there with a plate of roast chicken and several bottles of Cholula on the table between us, both of us rubbing tears from our eyes. “The level of emotion you're getting from me right now—I'm not saying it's dishonest,” he said. “I'm just saying it's not normal. I'd really love to go to bed. I promise you, I do not spend my time on the edge of tears.”
We were talking about the logistics involved in pulling off something like this, and how great it felt for him to be improvising in front of a camera again, and the curious tensions that popped up in his interview with Eminem. And then we got onto the subject of discomfort and disorientation, and the urge he has to seek out those feelings, and from there it was a quick jump to the nature of suffering. Before long we were sitting there with a plate of roast chicken and several bottles of Cholula on the table between us, both of us rubbing tears from our eyes. “The level of emotion you're getting from me right now—I'm not saying it's dishonest,” he said. “I'm just saying it's not normal. I'd really love to go to bed. I promise you, I do not spend my time on the edge of tears.”
I've easily played the recording of that conversation a dozen times, only one of them in order to transcribe. And while we spent plenty of time talking about comedy and the conventions of late-night and the sheer practical challenge of doing a show twice as long as his old one—the thing I've been thinking about the most since my time with Colbert is loss. The losses he's experienced in his life, yes, but really the meaning we all make of our losses. Deaths of loved ones, the phases of our children's lives hurtling by, jobs and relationships we never imagined would end. All of it. Among other things, our lives are compendiums of loss and change and what we make of it. I've never met anyone who's faced that reality more meaningfully than Stephen Colbert. I suppose, more than anything, that's what this story is about.
Also: ball jokes. Or the absence of them. They're doing network now, after all, and Colbert has declared a moratorium on ball jokes. (I believe I was present for the last one. It involved Greece and the Eurozone—and Paul Krugman's balls.)
They did the public-access show live at midnight, with no advance publicity and no Twitter or Facebook posts afterward. The only way the world would ever know that it happened is if someone, an insomniac or an inmate or one of the show's twelve viewers, looked up at the screen at some point and recognized Colbert hanging out with Eminem next to the potted plant. Maybe that person would tell somebody, and maybe that other person would tweet about it.
“I have to check right now to see how many people have seen this fucker,” Colbert said. “When we showed it at midnight, nobody watched it. I mean nobody.... We dug a hole in the backyard, yelled a show into it, then covered it up with dirt and said, ‘Don't tell anybody.’ ”
Someone must have spotted him on the show's morning rerun, because Twitter was beginning to light up in confusion and amazement. “YouTube has frozen the count,” he said. “They usually do that when people are hitting it so fast they go, ‘Wait, this might be bots.’ ” He seemed really pleased with how this experiment in pure virality was playing out. “We worked really hard for no one to know it was happening,” he said, “to see if anybody would know that it was happening.”
The question that has been hanging over the entire Late Show staff since last December, when Colbert put to rest the righteous blowhard he'd played for the past nine years, was: Who will he be now that he's no longer in character? How will his style change—and his opinions be expressed—if he's not delivering his jokes through an imbecile's mouth? When you're speaking to a huge swath of America each night, can you still carry a knife?
It's interesting to watch his interview with Eminem with this in mind. The whole thing is great, but there are a few spots that are electric, because we assume that Eminem is in on the conceit—that Colbert is playing a character who is aggressively ignorant of who he is—and yet he appears in these moments to be totally baffled by what's going on. “I'm so confused right now,” Eminem says at one point. “I'm trying to figure out if you're serious.” Colbert remains stubbornly, insultingly in character. “I'd like to apologize,” he says, “if you're a bigger deal than I know about.” Eminem stares back at him in disbelief. “Are you serious right now?” he says again. “I'm trying to figure out if you're serious right now.” Colbert straightens in his chair. “You seem pretty mad,” he says. And it's true, he does! If Eminem's reaction were purely a performance, there would be a very different energy there. We'd just be watching two guys play make-believe. But something else is going on. It's so subtle and (I imagine) unintentional, but in his sly execution of the conceit, Colbert is pushing them toward something more real than if he'd played it straight—difficult questions of ego and fame.
“I don't know what parts of the interview he, like, truly doesn't know what the fuck's going on,” Colbert said. “But yeah, I think there were times when he was genuinely confused.”
Shedding the suit of the high-status dummy he played for nine years has liberated him to do the comedy he really wants to do, he said. Whatever comes next—however he shape-shifts between being recognizably himself and playing a veiled or not-so-thinly-veiled character—the motivation will be all his. “I just want to do things that scratch an itch for me. That itch is often something that feels wrong. It's wrong because it breaks convention or is unexpected or at times uncomfortable. I like that feeling.”
The old character was “a continual style joke,” he said, and that style, punditry, had been a reaction to a time when O'Reilly and Limbaugh and the rest of the shouters exerted a real gravitational pull on the American psyche. For however often Jon Stewart and Colbert dismissed the notion that they had any mission beyond the (very difficult) one of telling great jokes, they had become a portal through which viewers made sense of American insanity. Their shows served as dense clouds of satirical antimatter.
And then things changed, slowly. America is different now. There will never be a shortage of daily atrocities to be satirized, but Colbert began to strain against the limitations of the character he played—“to have to pull everything through the keyhole of his worldview.” Even before CBS offered him the Late Show gig, he had decided to shut The Colbert Report down.
“I no longer felt that that model served to address the national mood,” he said. Ten years ago, the country was palpably more afraid and angry. “We're in a different place now.” Gay marriage. The reasonable and occasionally unifying course of the Obama administration. “We can stop freaking out that the guy's middle name is Hussein,” he said. “What else? Our response to the horror in South Carolina is to take the flag down. That is something I didn't think was ever going to happen.”
Publishing bylaws practically require a comparison at this point between the styles of Jimmy and Conan and James and Jimmy and Seth and Carson and now Colbert. But it feels silly to think about him in those terms. He's so unlike anyone else on television, or even anyone in TV memory, that the real question becomes what kind of public figure will emerge over time, and how much influence he'll have beyond the nightly delivery of great jokes (again, so hard to do that!).
When I raised the idea that he was one of the country's few public moral intellectuals, and that there were plenty of people out there wondering how that role might express itself in the new show, he said, “I have a morality. I don't know if it's the best morality. And I do like thinking. If people perceive that as a moral intellectualism, that's fine. That's up to them to decide. A friend of mine once said, ‘If someone says you're influencing them, then you're influential. It's not up for you to say. You can't take that away from them.’ But it's entirely not my intention. This I promise you. Because that's a short road to being a comedian in all seriousness. ‘As a comedian, in all seriousness, let me not entertain you.’ ”
Three days after the massacre in Charleston, Colbert returned to his hometown to lay flowers at the steps of Emanuel AME and join the peace march across the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge. He described it as the most moving and affirming gathering he'd ever witnessed. I know I wasn't alone, though, in wishing he had been on the air—and not because the country needed a laugh, obviously. What the country needed was a model for how to see and think and be. Jon Stewart went a long way toward providing that, with his I have no jokes opening monologue and his quiet, contained-rage attack on political opportunism. But the voice I selfishly longed for was Colbert's.
“We would have done it, if we had to,” he said when I asked if any part of him had felt a desire to talk about it on the air. “But no,” he said. “It's such an old form of a particular evil. Such a pure form, that it feels very old. It was like a dragon showed up. Like, yeah, there used to be dragons. I didn't know there still were dragons…and I don't necessarily crave facing that dragon with my little sword.” He paused for a moment and looked down at the table. “Tragedy is sacred,” he said. “People's suffering is sacred.”
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We took a ride one day from the temporary offices over to the completely gutted Ed Sullivan Theater. Along the way, Colbert talked about watching that week's episode of The Bachelorette with his family. His wife and daughter were sitting on the sofa wearing facial masks, and he decided to join them, he said, because the woman who does his makeup told him he had to get better at moisturizing. “I have a face like a catcher's mitt.” He went into the bathroom and dug through a pile of products and found one that, after you smear it on, congeals over your face in a thick golden gel. He pulled up a picture of him and his son both wearing it. “You know what it looks like?” he said. He thumbed in a search on his phone. “Here. Look at this. The Death Mask of Agamemnon.”
We took a ride one day from the temporary offices over to the completely gutted Ed Sullivan Theater. Along the way, Colbert talked about watching that week's episode of The Bachelorette with his family. His wife and daughter were sitting on the sofa wearing facial masks, and he decided to join them, he said, because the woman who does his makeup told him he had to get better at moisturizing. “I have a face like a catcher's mitt.” He went into the bathroom and dug through a pile of products and found one that, after you smear it on, congeals over your face in a thick golden gel. He pulled up a picture of him and his son both wearing it. “You know what it looks like?” he said. He thumbed in a search on his phone. “Here. Look at this. The Death Mask of Agamemnon.”
Inside there were scaffolds everywhere, including one in the middle of the floor that rose to the top of the theater's dome, which had been blocked for decades by air ducts and sound buffers and was now being fully restored. There's a massive wooden chandelier up there that predates Ed Sullivan and has individual stained-glass chambers that house its bulbs. We climbed to the top, and after running a few questions by the guys working up there (turns out that whoever's job it was to change the bulbs all those years ago used to stub out his cigars and leave them in the chandelier), Colbert wandered over to the edge of the scaffolding to look at the scene depicted in the arched stained-glass windows that had also been revealed. “Look at that lute player,” he said, and then he gave a quick little off-the-cuff lecture on Venetian-Moorish design.
The micro level at which he is involved in every aspect of preparations is bewildering. He moved so quickly throughout the theater, followed by a small phalanx of architects and designers and contractors. He climbed small hidden ladders in the wings to stand on exposed beams and demonstrate how he needed sneak doors to swing. He headed down below stage level, into what will be either a writers' room or a greenroom, to propose how an air-conditioning duct be rerouted. In every moment of every conversation, his focus on the person in front of him and the logistical conundrum at hand was complete. He never showed frustration, never seemed overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff coming at him. If you didn't know he was the talent and came upon that scene with a van full of HVAC parts, you'd definitely be like, Oh, that's the guy I need to ask where to install these.
There were so many details to consider. The arc of the stage and the exact angle of his desk and if Jon Batiste's band should be on one level or two. (Jon wants to be able to look into the eyes of the drummer, which makes sense, but there were other aesthetic and practical concerns to weigh, too.) Would the panels behind his desk be just one shade of cobalt, or could they get a range of cobalts? What about the bulbs? Does it need to be LED, or can we use strips of good old GE bulbs?
Back at his office, Colbert delivered a soliloquy on the necessity of focus and intention, being fully present for whatever moment you are in. He was talking about comedy, and how to make a TV show 200 times a year, but it also felt like a text lifted from the Buddha's sutras. The final goal, the product, is beside the point. “The end product is jokes, but you could easily say the end product is intention. Having intentionality at all times… The process of process is process.”
And then he talked about the Food Network show Chopped. The reason he lovesChopped is that it's a show that is wholly about process, about creation within a limited range of possibilities. “This show,” he said, meaning The Late Show, “isChopped. Late-night shows are Chopped. Who are your guests tonight? Your guests tonight are veal tongue, coffee grounds, and gummy bears. There, make a show.… Make an appetizer that appeals to millions of people. That's what I like. How could you possibly do it? Oh, you bring in your own flavors. Your own house band is another flavor. You have your own flavor. The audience itself is a base dish, like a rice pilaf or something. And then together it's ‘Oh shit, that's an actual meal.’ And that's what every day is like at one of these shows. Something is one thing in the morning, and then by the end of the day it's a totally different thing. It's allprocess.”
Earlier that day the world went haywire for a few hours. The New York Stock Exchange went offline, and at that point nobody knew why. Stocks in China were cratering. United Airlines grounded hundreds of flights because of computer glitches. In a morning pitch meeting, one of the show's writers got a news alert, and they decided to try to put together a video to be released online later that day. They'd been doing this once or twice a week, as a way of keeping the tools sharp and their audience engaged.
Early afternoon, a handful of writers and producers filed into Colbert's office and passed the script around. The gist was that technology had failed us, and Colbert, possibly the last celebrity alive, had barricaded himself in a room with piles of office supplies and snack foods and a chicken with which he would procreate and start civilization anew. He started reading the script in character, rewriting bits on the fly, and those updates were typed into an updated script that would be loaded into a monitor for the shoot.
They finished the script, and he headed off to check out the set, which had been thrown together in a small, windowless room—“the bad room,” they call it—that some writers normally work in. The desk in the bad room was now covered with piles of papers and snacks and a jug labeled urine. There was a tire and a thick rope and a mound of those little coffee K-Cups in assorted flavors.
A woman carrying the chicken arrived and stood in the hall outside the bad room. “They only gave me a half hour's notice,” she told me, and then described how she had to drive several miles to her farm in Jersey to find the one she'd recently used in an episode of Orange Is the New Black.
Colbert appeared from makeup and said, “Hi, great to see you again. Come on in,” and led her into the bad room, where they cleared a spot for her and the chicken beneath the desk. The whole shoot took about twenty minutes and ended with the chicken flying out of his arms (“She's scrappy!”) and then Colbert realizing that the one thing he forgot to bring into his bunker was the K-Cup machine. He bites into one of the plastic K-Cups in despair. The coffee grounds go all over his face and mouth and up his nose. “Oh, that's really pumpkin-y.” End scene.
He went to the bathroom to wash the coffee out of his nose and then as he was heading back to his office got an update on a request they'd made to Mitt Romney to do a teaser spot for the new show. They felt it was important that their first fun interaction with a politician involve a Republican. (“I think he'll do it,” Colbert said. “I think he likes to have fun. Plus, he's got nothing else going on.”) Then it was into a meeting with various camera techs and graphic artists to discuss complicated questions regarding how images might be projected onto the surfaces of the new theater (I'm sworn to silence on this, but the stuff they were talking about was very cool), and from there he headed to an editing bay down the hall.
He took a seat on the floor to watch a replay of the video—“Apocalypse Dow”—and give notes. “I am high as a kite right now!” he said. “I tried to wash my nose out, but all I did was brew a cup of pumpkin-spice coffee in my nose.”
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