Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness (3 page)

Second City thrives on teamwork, its actors following one of Viola Spolin’s principles to “always agree, always go along” with a skit as it unfolds. The phrase Second City lives by is, “yes, and. . . .” Once welcomed to the troupe’s stage, Colbert found it easy to say “yes.” His penchant for playing straight-laced fools was a good fit with the team, earning him roles in
Ku Klux Klambake
,
Destiny, and How to Avoid It
, and
Where’s Your God Now, Charlie Brown?

By 1991, however, Second City’s reputation had become a handicap. How could the troupe that spawned Nichols and May, Belushi and Ackroyd, Martin Short and now Mike Myers be as funny as it once was? Chicago critics had tired of the troupe. Second City, the
Chicago Reader
wrote, “is not in business to change the world; it’s here to sell drinks, give the audience a couple of chuckles, and send them home with a smile and a good buzz.” But even the staunchest critics had to admit that every Second City show had its moments. Colbert provided one when he dreamed up a black woman as his alter ego.

By 1992, Colbert had moved from Second City e.t.c. to its Mainstage in Old Town Chicago. His first job there was as understudy to Steve Carell, who would later star with him on
The Daily Show
before going on to
The Office
. Carell, like Colbert, had grown up in a prim Catholic family and was getting laughs by acting clueless. In early 1993, after watching poet Maya Angelou read at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, Colbert began thinking, “I wish I was an old black woman! They have so much character.”

With that inspiration, Colbert and Carell crafted a sketch that sent the two headed back to their southern hometowns. The sketch had them riding a train, discussing how great it was to be back home, waxing nostalgic until they stepped onto the platform. A woman then approached Colbert, calling him Shirley Wentworth. Reviving his southern accent, he responded in kind, spewing phrases like, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry to hear that,” and “I love you, too, darlin’.” Turning to Carell, Colbert said, “I forgot to tell you. When I’m home, I’m an old black woman.”

With fresh talent, the new Second City won over critics. The
Chicago Reader
praised the latest revue as “[f]ree of boneheaded skits and blessed with some dramatic and comic inspiration and swift interplay between the unmellow seven cast members.” The
Reader
singled out Colbert as “effortlessly arrogant.”

His career solidifying, Colbert continued his long-distance courtship of Evelyn McGee. He sent letters containing love poems by E.E. Cummings. Their calls lasted longer into the night, but the couple had seen each other only when Colbert went to Charleston for Christmas and on occasional trysts in New York, where Evelyn was living. Once, when a Second City sketch required Colbert to learn a few notes on the trombone, he showed up outside Evelyn’s Manhattan flat to offer a brass serenade. By the summer of 1993, however, the distance between them required closing.

They talked, then agreed. Evelyn moved to Chicago, where she took a job as the development director for an avant-garde theater company. Before long, Stephen and Evie, as she was known, were living together in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. And on October 9, 1993, the Second City’s revue had an understudy playing many of its key roles. That afternoon, in the Second Presbyterian Church of Charleston, South Carolina, Stephen Tyrone Colbert and Evelyn Brabham McGee married. After their honeymoon, the Colberts returned to Chicago, but they were already making other plans.

Colbert had ridden live, sketch comedy as far as Second City could take him. “I was there for five years,” he said, “and it was everything to me.” But having seen other Second City stars rise still higher, he hoped to follow in their footsteps. Perhaps he would try television like the
Saturday Night Live
legends, or even movies. Ten years had passed since Colbert arrived in the Chicago area as an effete, twenty-year-old Southerner who had just fine-tuned his last name. He had been prim, proper, angry, lonely - “really willing to share my grief with you,” he said. In 1994, he left Chicago as a seasoned comic, relaxed, inventive, and lightning quick. What might America’s first city, New York, offer a “high status fool?”

“There’s no status I would not surrender for a joke.”

The camera opens on a beat-up old car rolling along a wooded interstate. The driver is listening to radio bulletins. It seems that a serial killer is on the loose, leaving various body parts in his wake. The suspect is a white male, middle-aged, 180 pounds – in short, identical to the car’s driver. Up ahead, he sees five hitchhikers. He pulls over. All five pile in the backseat. As the car roars back onto the highway, a bubbly theme song starts: “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d of Baked a Cake.”

Rolling down the road, the hitchhikers exchange suspicious glances. It appears that the dog in the front seat has fake fangs. There’s a rattlesnake in the car. The driver is snuffing out cigarettes on his bald spot. Now he’s taking Polaroid pictures of the stars, each shown as a still above the names Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert. When the car pulls off at Exit 57, the show has its title, but not its audience.

Every class has its clown and every party its “life of.” Yet local wits who take their humor to bigger stages can choose from just two paths, sketch comedy or stand-up. Back when Colbert was playing Dungeons & Dragons, odds favored the sketch comedian. Stand-up was in retreat, holding its shrinking audience by being brash or outlandish like George Carlin, Steve Martin, and Richard Pryor. Sketch comedy, meanwhile, had taken off with the 1975 debut of
Saturday Night Live
, which spawned
ABC’s Fridays
and endless re-runs of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
. By 1984, when Colbert arrived in Chicago, the biggest comic roles in movies and TV were going to former sketch comedians Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and the like. But then the stage shifted.

During the years Colbert was learning to be professionally funny, stand-up comedy cleaned up its act and rose from the dead. Throughout the 1980s, more than 300 comedy clubs opened across the United States. Beyond Greenwich Village’s legendary The Bitter End, stand-ups were getting laughs in Memphis, Tennessee, San Antonio, Texas, San Diego, California, Omaha, Nebraska, and points in between. Stand-up became a regular feature of cable TV, and any star said to be rising was going it alone. One charismatic comic was all it took to make a hit TV show or movie, so by the time Colbert moved to New York in 1994, the biggest comic roles were being snatched up by former stand-ups – Tim Allen, Roseanne Barr, Ray Romano, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld. Colbert, who had never shown the slightest interest in stand-up, was in for some lean years.

But Stephen did not come to New York solely with his new wife. Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, though no longer a couple, moved to New York to try sketch comedy off-Broadway. Accompanying them was Amy’s brother, David, who had just published “
Barrel Fever,”
his debut book of bizarrely funny stories. David had also written his first play,
Stitches,
the story of a disfigured woman given her own TV show, which leads to a nation of fans disfiguring their own faces.

HBO execs loved the quirky play and hired two of its stars, Paul and Amy, to write a pilot for a sketch comedy show. They, in turn, called Colbert in Chicago to see if he would help. On this thin hope, Stephen and Evie packed and moved to New York. “The Three Idiots” were re-united. Pleased with the pilot, HBO ordered six half-hour episodes as a trial run. “They left us alone for four months at a time to write,” Colbert remembered. “We had a lot of freedom.” In the winter of 1995,
Exit 57
debuted.

Following its serial-killer opening,
Exit 57
was brought to prime time. “The Three Idiots” hoped the show might be the next
SNL
, but it lacked the filter of Lorne Michaels, the savvy
SNL
producer who knew precisely what was not ready for prime time. Colbert and company soon learned that comedy on a small stage seems even smaller on a studio set.

Performing before a live audience instead of using a laugh track, gag after gag played to smatterings of chuckles. Each skit was set in the Midwestern town of Quad Cities, a spin-off from David Lynch’s cultish series, “
Twin Peaks.
” Many of the gags were funny, some very funny. There was Colbert as a smooth-talker who shows his date a porn video, records her outrage, and plays it back to himself after she storms out. Then there was Colbert as dutiful father, asking Dinello whether he “got any tonight” with his daughter. When Dinello says “no,” Colbert sits beside him. “Pretend I’m her,” he says, and the two kiss. And there was
Trudy and Eddy - The White Trash Couple
, with Colbert and Sedaris as marriage counselors undressing in front of clients, and Colbert as a surgeon juggling body parts.

“No one can really figure it out,” Dinello told the
Chicago Sun-Times
. “We never sat down and said this is our concept.” Colbert said simply, “We try to amuse ourselves.” It was hard to tell how many others were amused by
Exit 57,
but the show certainly confused critics.
The New York Times
derided its “off-kilter” tone while
Rolling Stone
liked the show: “Although some bits play more like darkly funny one-acts than sketches, others can vault you into the comic stratosphere once reserved for
SNL
. Ratings were equally mixed. Early numbers were high enough to earn
Exit 57
another six shows in September 1995, and the show was nominated for CableACE awards in the categories of best writing and best comedy series. But audiences quickly turned away, and the ride ended after a dozen episodes. So forgettable was
Exit 57
that even now, with Colbert one of TV’s biggest stars, old segments on YouTube have just a few thousand hits.

By the time
Exit 57
was canceled, Stephen and Evie were the parents of Madeleine Colbert, named for Evie’s mother. Colbert, with his wife choosing to be a stay-at-home mom, now had more pressure to be professionally funny.” The thirty-one-year-old father took his high-status foolishness back to the audition circuit, where he was turned down repeatedly. With so many stand-up comics around, TV execs no longer needed the Second City
veterans.

“I was completely desperate,” Colbert remembered. He even resorted to using infant Madeleine as a puppet in an audition tape. That tape got him a job as a writer and performer on the one last bastion of sketch comedy,
The Dana Carvey Show.
Carvey’s eerily accurate impressions had made him a standout on
SNL,
and his goofy Garth character turned the phrase “NOT!” into a cultural staple in the movie,
Wayne’s World
. Working with Carvey, Colbert looked forward to years of steady employment. How could such a talent, bolstered by Colbert, Steve Carell, and
SNL
writer Robert Smigel go the way of
Exit 57
?

Timing is everything in comedy. Anyone can get a laugh at a dull party, in a boring classroom, around an office water cooler. But the ability to pause just long enough, then deliver a punch line or a pratfall is the skill young actors line up to learn. And in a cultural context, timing can determine the fate of entire shows.
SNL,
so fresh in 1975, seemed stale a decade later. Watch a clip of
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in
and see if it amuses.
The Dana Carvey Show
, by contrast, still seems funny, and Colbert and Carell are two reasons why.

In “Waiters Who Are Nauseated By Food,” they read menu specials to diners while trying not to retch. “Leftover Beatle Memories” played off the then-recent
Beatles Anthology
documentary. Carvey played a bouncy Paul, Smigel a snoring Ringo, and Colbert a mustachioed George with a Liverpudlian accent: “I killed a man once. I think it was a stagehand. He looked at me funny, so I had to. It was all taken care of by the record company, so no one found out.”

But other bits seemed poorly timed. Was America ready for a President Clinton nursing baby animals from plastic breasts? And was Taco Bell, the show’s sponsor, ready for a dancing taco presenting Carvey with a big check, and calling him a “shameless whore?” Apparently not. Taco Bell pulled out after two shows; just seven more aired, and Colbert was unemployed again. Today,
The
Dana Carvey Show
is seen as having been ahead of its time, and it is credited with boosting the careers of Colbert, Carell, Louis C.K., and the screenwriter of
Being John Malkovich,
Charlie Kaufman. But Carvey later called it “probably the most bizarre variety show in the history of American television.” Apparently, he missed the various shows hosted by Sonny and Cher.

Then came what Colbert called “the year where I wasn’t doing anything.” The crash of the Carvey show killed TV sketch comedy. America in the mid-nineties was in no mood for cynics. The economy was booming, the president was popular, and a dazzling parade of digital technology was changing entertainment, leisure, and life itself. The relative “good times” of the Clinton years spawned bland comedy. Viewers were happy with
Friends
, the
Single Guy
, and
Home Improvement
. At the box office, comedies were safe and retrograde –
101 Dalmatians
,
The Nutty Professor
, and the latest Jim Carrey vehicle featuring another Jerry Lewis shtick. Colbert, stuck in New York with a wife and child, grabbed any gig he could get.

In his year of “not doing anything,” Colbert: (a) helped Robert Smigel turn the Carvey show into an animated superhero spoof,
The Ambiguously Gay Duo
, that found a home on
SNL
; (b) contracted with
Good Morning, America
to do short humorous pieces - pitched twenty but shot just one, a straight-faced visit to a Rube Goldberg design competition; (c) did a voiceover on
The Chris Rock Show
; (d) got a cameo on the Michael J. Fox sitcom,
Spin City
; (e) did a commercial for a Nebraska bank; and (f) landed a humor piece on the Op-Ed page of
The New York Times
.

The
Times
’ piece played off news of a rocket car that had set a land speed record of 763 mph. Colbert and Paul Dinello speculated on a future with “a rocket car in every driveway!” Milk deliveries, ambulance runs, paper routes – all at top speeds of 700 miles per hour, but only if the government provided the infrastructure. “Clearly, the future belongs to the long, flat, sandy straightaway. . . . And once we’ve paved the oceans, there will be no stopping us.”

Selling himself as never before, Colbert went to plenty of auditions but landed no permanent gigs. With his wife at home and his daughter beginning to toddle, “I thought I made a huge mistake in what I decided to do for a living.” He saw little chance of starting over. “It wasn’t like I was going to go to law school. It was too late. The die was cast.”

Colbert’s older siblings had carried on their father’s professionalism, becoming lawyers, executives, trade specialists. But young Stephen Colbert was on the verge of becoming just another Second City veteran who aimed to be the next Belushi, but went off to New York and disappeared. His demeanor could have allowed him to become a TV anchorman in some mid-level city, or he could have ended up as the funniest father at kids’ birthday parties. He might have been an amazing used-car salesman. All three seemed more likely than the remote chance that this hybrid of the straight-laced South and Chicago improv stages would become the most celebrated wit in America.

But deep in the blandness of Clinton nation, the seeds of Colbert Nation had been sown. On July 22, 1996, Comedy Central debuted its late-night entry,
The Daily Show
. Given its current eminence – eighteen Emmys and counting –
The Daily Show
of 1996-98 should be called,
The Daily Show Without Jon Stewart.
Host Craig Kilborn, a veteran of ESPN Sports Center, did his best with modest news parodies, celebrity guests, and the occasional bright spot such as “This Week in God” or “Your Moment of Zen.”

Reports from the show’s
correspondents were “News of the Weird” accounts, stories about Bigfoot, aliens, or animals doing things that animals look ridiculous doing. Kilborn enjoyed embarrassing his guests by asking “The Five Questions.” Based on questions the handsome host asked his dates, they included: “Canada: What Went Wrong?”; “Who Left the Cake Out in the Rain?”; and “Spell ‘Monogamy.’” This early version of the show drew a half-million viewers, acceptable by late-night standards, but dismissed by critics as trivial and mean-spirited.

Colbert never watched it, yet in the spring of 1997, when his agent got him an audition to become a correspondent, he had little choice but to show up.
The Daily Show
producer, Madeline Smithberg, had seen “Waiters Who Are Nauseated by Food,” and it “just cracked me up,” she said. So when Colbert auditioned by pitching stories that
Good Morning, America
had turned down, he was signed to a contract. He was less than thrilled. “It was totally a day job. I did not believe in the show, I did not watch the show, and they paid dirt. It was literally just a paycheck to show up.”

To Colbert’s surprise,
The Daily Show
correspondents were expected to do more than read on camera. Each had to seek out weird stories, travel to the scene, write a script, and shoot footage in one or two takes. Doing 120 pieces a year was hard for a sketch master accustomed to polishing and perfecting each gag, but Colbert’s ability to wing it paid off. And his early years of mimicking TV newsmen made him ideally suited to fake news.