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Stephen Colbert
Interviewed by Nathan Rabin
January 25th, 2006
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?
http://www.avclub.com/content/node/44705
There's much more.
