Watching the first episode of “The Colbert Report,” I remember thinking, He cannot possibly sustain this.
Mine wasn’t the early-days concern I have heard expressed most often as Stephen Colbert prepares to deliver his final “Colbert Report” Thursday: that no matter how large his talent, how good his Second City training, the host wouldn’t be able to maintain the character of a preening, proudly unread, right-wing blowhard.
It was, rather, the density of the task he was taking on that worried me, the sheer number of words and setups and jokes and comic misdirections he would have to perform every night.
From the “C” shape of his anchor desk to the shining “C’s” decorating the set around him, this was almost all Colbert, almost all the time.
From night one, when he coined the character-defining term “truthiness,” the show made me laugh very hard. “You’re not the elites, the country-club crowd,” Colbert told his viewers on that show, Oct. 17, 2005. “I know for a fact that my country club would never let you in.”
But he was the host, the lead performer and the celebrity interviewer for four entirely new half-hour shows each week. It looked exhausting.
Now, nine years later, Colbert has proven that he could avoid nervous debilitation and maintain the character, brilliantly. He even testified before Congress in character, which takes not only skill but brass shined to a very high polish.
But far beyond any feat of stamina or virtuosity, he leaves having shepherded one of the great series in television history, a satirical talk show that danced along the line between the portrayal of a fictional talk show in “The Larry Sanders Show” and the real thing, Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” — and is in the same, premier league as both.
“The comedy legacy of ‘The Colbert Report’ is cutting satire not done in that way since Jonathan Swift,” said David Razowsky, Colbert’s Second City castmate in three revues, from 1992 to 1994. “It’s a game changer. No one that I know of has ever sacrificed their name for the show. Stephen Colbert sacrificed his name for the show.”
Colbert, in other words, was willing to be “Stephen Colbert.” And night in and night out, he was willing to voice opinions, ask questions, demonstrate behaviors that were antithetical to the views of Stephen Colbert in order to guide the audience to an understanding of absurdity in government policy, ridiculousness in marketing, hypocrisy in news media, silliness all around us.
“It’s kind of glorious that Stephen has created such a strong persona to describe a human being and their sense of entitlement as a wealthy white man,” said Susan Messing, a peer of Colbert’s in the Chicago improv scene. “It’s an extraordinary character, which means Stephen is a brilliant actor because Stephen is so not that human being in real life.”
And, she adds, “It might be unprecedented that somebody has maintained a persona for that long,” all while making a point: “‘The Daily Show’ and ‘Colbert Report,’ they’ve done so much to kind of expose the hypocrisy of our government and, frankly, have made government more accessible to a broader community. People who might not be interested are actually interested in the legislative process.”
Andrew Alexander, the CEO and co-owner of The Second City, marvels at “the kind of forward thinking (Colbert) must have had, understanding an audience was craving for that king of thing.”
“He made it safe for comedians to do more than simply be funny,” Peter Sagal, host of the comedy quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me,” said via email.
“All comedians know that every gag has an expiration date, like bottles of milk,” said Sagal, who interviewed Colbert on stage at Second City’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2009. “The fact that he made it work for 9 years, never losing a step, and leaving at the top of his game means that more and more younger writers and comedians and performers will take the same sort of insane risks that he did. Most of them will fail, because very, very few people have Colbert’s talent. But right now, some brilliant young person is creating a character or cast of them (maybe for a podcast, or YouTube channel) that will be even funnier, sharper, and even more central to the culture than ‘Stephen Colbert’ has been.”
But Colbert didn’t just go for laughs on his show. He gave the character a back story, as a TV newsman (like Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, one of the models for “Stephen Colbert”) and even showed some of his old reporting clips.
He was never afraid to be goofy and playful, either, taking the conceit far beyond simple mimicry of O’Reilly’s tics or attitudes. Another part of “Colbert’s” back story was that he had a great lost love and a band in the 1980s. The show combined those and produced, of course, a music video, a perfect piece of stalker pop/’80s nostalgia called “Charlene (I’m Right Behind You).”
That has been one of the great separators of “The Colbert Report” from “The Daily Show,” the show that spawned “Colbert.” “Daily Show” is very serious about its comedy, often ending its bits on a “take that!” note. Colbert, the host, has been able to maintain a joyful, kid-with-a-toy-box quality about what he was doing.
“It must be gleeful for him to put that cape of entitled white man on,” Messing said.
That speaks to what Del Close, the late Chicago and Second City improv guru, used to teach, said Razowsky: “Del Close used to say, ‘Wear your character lightly, like a boater (a straw hat).’ Stephen wears it lightly, and he pulls it off.”
It’s one of the chief reasons that his character — odious in his particulars, the kind of fellow who, in completing the phrase “Love is,” came up with “a full-length mirror” — has worn so well. Think of the contrast between a “Saturday Night Live” recurring sketch seeming tired by the third appearance and Colbert keeping his character fresh for almost a decade.
Colbert kept probing deeper for the emotional truth of a scene or a moment. That comes from his time here, his peers said.
“At Second City, you were taught to speak your truths,” said Razowsky, who conducted one of the most in-depth recent interviews of Colbert for his A.D.D. Comedy podcast. “It’s the idea of you going out and saying your piece and not backing away.”
This was in evidence last week, said Razowsky, when Colbert had President Barack Obama on the show and did not modify one bit his standard ploy of accepting applause meant for his guests as if it were for “Stephen Colbert.”
His improv training was also on display every night in the show’s interview segment, which had extra potency because you were watching Colbert try to talk to the intelligent and the famous in character.
“It’s the comedy equivalent of Ginger Rogers,” Sagal said, “doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels. But more than that, it’s his fearlessness and his utter commitment to whatever he was doing. Colbert has a kind of foolhardy genius for pushing gags as far as they needed to go, which sometimes was very far indeed.”
Sagal pointed to what he deemed his favorite Colbert bit of all time, a nine-minute take on gay marriage starting to become legalized, from 2010. As the pugnacious conservative, Colbert urged his male viewers to fight gay marriage by finding a gay man and pretending to date him — all the way up to the altar — then calling it off, souring the man on marriage forever. But in Colbert’s telling it spun out as a vividly detailed love story that had the host in tears over the beautiful thing he was giving up when he jilted his groom-to-be.
“What’s amazing about it is, first, again, how long it is,” Sagal said. “Nobody does written comedy on TV that goes on that long. But second, it’s the absolute commitment to the conceit of the gag. He goes and goes and goes and becomes absolutely, genuinely heartbreaking. That’s Chicago, and that’s Second City.”
Still, as interesting as it is to think about what Colbert does and why it works, my gut-level reaction to him going away this week is pretty much the same thing I heard from Messing when I told her I was calling to talk about “The Colbert Report” ending.
“Aw,” she said, sadness and affection and loss mixed up in that one syllable.
It is better, of course, for Stephen Colbert to end “The Colbert Report” now, when people still want more, than to drag the character into a Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush administration. It’ll be fascinating to see what the mind capable of guiding “The Colbert Report” can do with the very tired network late-night format when Colbert takes over for David Letterman as host of CBS’ “The Late Show” late next summer.
But, still: Aw.
Twitter @StevenKJohnson