Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness (6 page)

“
I used to make up stuff in my bio all the time – that I used to be a professional ice-skater and stuff like that. I found it so inspirational. Why not make myself cooler than I am?”

Mention George Orwell and the title of his dystopian novel on totalitarianism will soon follow. Fears of “Big Brother” are still invoked whenever government surveillance is mentioned, yet
1984
remains a work of fiction. It is another Orwell work, “Politics and the English Language,” that describes our current state of affairs.

In that essay, Orwell argued that “the English language is in a bad way.” Language matters, he said, because it links rhetoric to reality. When rhetoric is detached from reality, the consequences
extend far beyond the classroom and the reading room. “N
ow, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes,” Orwell wrote. “. . . [B]ut an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

By 2005, America’s media landscape resembled Orwell’s drunk. Ugly language was daily fare. Foolish thoughts were passed off as gospel, and each person had his own set of facts. Best-selling memoirs were found to contain invented scenes, and major publications, including
The Atlantic
and
The New York Times,
admitted to publishing fabricated stories. A new online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, allowed anyone to amend any article with little fact-checking. A billion blogs filled the Internet, each blogger holding fast to some hometown version of truth.

Nearly half of all Americans did not believe in evolution, and an equally shocking number thought global warming was a hoax. No one seemed to trust anyone, except the one source each trusted, whom no one else trusted. Was all truth relative? Were scientific theories, even those endorsed by the scientific community, just maybes? Were facts, as Ronald Reagan once misstated, just “stupid things?”

When
The Colbert Report
was first conceived,
Daily Show
producers considered it a passing skit. But shortly after the 2004 election, Colbert began to worry. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ve been through two election cycles here; I’ve been here a long time. I still love it but I’m not sure how much longer I’ll love it.’” He still wanted to work with Stewart, but how?

Stewart, capitalizing on his skyrocketing celebrity, had contracted with Comedy Central to create a new show. So together with his head writer, Ben Karlin, Stewart began to see
The Colbert Report
as something more than a skit.

Cable TV’s prevailing pundit, Bill O’Reilly, had just been accused of sexual harassment. Having settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, O’Reilly was unrepentant and the case was hopelessly muddled. Who knew whom to believe? Who would ever know? And was there no limit to celebrity ego?

In January 2005, as the nation braced for a second Bush term, Stewart and Karlin approached Doug Herzog, president of Comedy Central, to propose a spin-off of
The Daily Show
. The pitch was brief. It took Herzog just a few minutes to see the possibilities. Stewart, Carlin, and Colbert spent the next few months hammering out the details of
The Colbert Report
. The dozen clips already aired on
The
Daily
Show
were a start, but they seemed too strident. A sniping pundit telling everyone to “shut up!” might be funny for a moment, but he couldn’t carry a half-hour show.

Colbert’s character would have to be broader, deeper, more farcical. He would have to take himself
sooo
seriously that no one else could take him seriously. Shamelessly waving the flag, drenching his stage in eagles, bunting, and other symbols of freedom, he would be a living symbol of the simple-minded people who claim exclusive rights to the words “truth,” “patriot,” and “American.” He would be angry, but not for long; critical, but only in jest. He would be, as Colbert said, “well intentioned but poorly informed.” And above all, while mastering the current political jargon, he would have to call attention to its distortions. Was a former sketch comedian up to such a role?

The Colbert Report
was announced in May 2005. It would, said Comedy Central president Herzog, be “our version of the
O’Reilly Factor
with
Stephen
Colbert
.” For those unfamiliar with the name, it was explained as Colbear, with a soft ‘t’. And Repore, with a parallel ending. The
Daily Show
promos featured Colbert sneering, “It’s French, bitch,” but that idea was cut. Too mean.
The Colbert Report
would debut in October, the press was told, for an eight-week trial run.

Colbert went to work finding role models. He was already in awe of O’Reilly, who he called “Papa Bear.” “I’d love to be able to put a chain of words together the way he does,” Colbert said, “without much thought as to what it might mean, compared to what you said about the same subject the night before.” But no show could survive with only one model, so Colbert also watched Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage - a whole murder of crowing cable pundits. And while he watched, the American rhetoric grew still more strident, more Orwellian.

On October 17, 2005, a day on which nothing of even the slightest importance occurred, Stewart closed
The Daily
Show
with a promo for an upcoming program “with our own Stephen Colbert.” The camera cut to Colbert at his desk.

“Stephen, we’re really excited about the show tonight,” Stewart said.

“Me, too, Jon. I really feel like I’m going to make a lot of money doing this.”

Moments later, viewers who stayed tuned saw a different Colbert, one who seemed injected with testosterone. Gone was the stern, earnest correspondent. Buried deep was the sketch comedian. Stepping – no, leaping - to the front was the president of Colbert Nation. Commanding the camera by approaching it from askew, Colbert revealed his top stories. The last headline said it all: “Finally, a new television show premieres and changes - the - world! Open wide, Baby Bird, ‘cause Mama’s got a big fat night crawler of truth. Here comes the
Colbert Report.
”

The now familiar opening showed the once shy, nerdy fantasy fan giving the American flag a full-body, Iwo Jima wave, all but bitch slapping the camera. Cut to Colbert at his desk. Sure, his name was on the set, he began, and it was overhead, on the screen in front of him, on chaser lights, on either side of the desk, it shaped like a giant “C.” But this was not about him.
The Colbert Report
was dedicated to the heroes. “And who are the heroes? The people who watch this show. Average hard-working Americans. You’re not the elite. You’re not the country club crowd. I know for a fact that my country club would never let you in. But you
get it
. And you come from a long line of it-getters. You come from a line of folks who say somethings – got – to – be – done. Well, you’re doing something right now. You’re - watching - television. And on this show, your voice will be heard - in - the form of my voice.”

A modest beginning, but what followed would forever be Colbert’s trademark. With little fanfare, he introduced Tonight’s Word: “Truthiness.” “Now I’m sure some of the word police, the ‘Wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, will say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word.’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries
or
reference books. They’re elitist, constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen.” Colbert moved on to the routine he would soon perform just a dozen paces from the president of the United States: “More nerve endings in your gut than your brain. Look it up in your gut.” He gave examples of Bush decisions that, if you
thought
about them, were absurd, but if you
felt
them, seemed like right moves. “The truthiness is, anyone can read the news
to
you. I promise to
feel
the news
at
you.” And a lexicon was born.

Others had tried to sum up the slippery nature of truth in the cable age. “Factoids.” “Tabloid truths.” “Bullshit,” as in the 2005 bestseller,
On Bullshit
. But Colbert had come up with a term -
the
term - that would endure. And he had coined it just two hours before taping his first show.

During the 4:00 p.m. rehearsal, the “Word of the Day” had been “truth,” which Colbert planned to contrast with those annoying “facts.” But he decided “truth” was not “dumb” enough. “I wanted a silly word that would feel wrong in your mouth,” he said. Thinking for a minute, he had it: truthiness. And like the lie that, as Mark Twain said, “gets halfway around the world before truth puts on its boots,” truthiness began its march through American culture.

Most newspapers praised Colbert’s debut. “A
hilarious send-up of TV news’ puffed-up pundit class,” said the
Philadelphia
Inquirer
.
“Occasionally brilliant, occasionally loopy, definitely entertaining,” said the
Houston Chronicle
. A few did not get the joke. “It feels like a weaker extension of
The Daily Show
, judged the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
. But truthiness was here to stay. Rarely has a recent coinage been so quickly and universally embraced. Journalists began using truthiness whenever truth proved less than, well, truthy. The word surfaced on ABC’s
Nightline
,
USA Today
,
The Washington Post,
Newsweek
,
CNN
,
MSNBC
,
Fox News
, the
Associated Press
,
Editor & Publisher
,
Salon
, and
The Huffington Post
. “We live in the age of truthiness,”
New York Times
columnist Frank Rich observed. And i
n January 2006, the American Dialect Society agreed, naming truthiness its Word of the Year. Runners-up included “Katrina,” “podcast,” “intelligent design,” and “disaster industrial complex.”

Lexicographers noted that truthiness was not a new word. Unbeknownst to Colbert, it had been used sparingly since 1824. But the word fit the times and became immortal. By 2010, it could be found in several dictionaries, but the Wordinistas at Webster’s still left it out of their dictionaries. The authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, however defined truthiness as “
the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” The OED noted the word’s use in the nineteenth century, but gave “U.S. humorist Stephen
Colbert” credit for its popularization in “the modern sense.”

Comedy Central had expected to wait out the eight-week trial run to consider the fate of
The Colbert Report
, but truthiness, combined with Colbert’s sassiness, made the show an instant hit.
The Daily Show
had taken six years and “The Year of Jon Stewart” in 2004 to amass its nightly audience of 2.5 million. But from the first week of the
Report
, some 80 percent of
Daily Show
viewers stayed tuned to Colbert. Just two weeks after the debut, Comedy Central renewed the show for a year.

“I want to
thank
Comedy Central for picking up the show,” Colbert said. “This says really good things about you guys. You clearly ‘get it.’” Some thought Colbert’s caricature could not carry a half-hour show. Colbert himself worried about seeming too critical or partisan. “I don’t think he’s necessarily a Republican or Democrat,” he said of his character. “He is part of the ‘Blame America Last’ crowd.” Colbert had known strident conservatives in Charleston, at Hampden-Sydney, even at Northwestern, and he knew they weren’t much fun to be around. As the lone presence before the camera, Colbert knew that however loony he might seem, he would have to be likable. “If you try to maintain your humanity when you do the jokes, and not play on tragedy, or cynically dismiss people’s beliefs, then I think people will, hopefully, respect your attempt to stay civil.”

But could such a simplistic figure outlast TV’s incessant demand for the new? Producer Ben Karlin saw vast potential. “We’ve got some stuff coming up that will really continue to expand the universe more and more and more, and make people realize that this is not just a parody,” Karlin said.

Throughout the rest of 2005 and into 2006, American rhetoric got uglier and uglier. The contrast between what was said and who was saying it suggested Oscar Wilde’s novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Like the eponymous Dorian, the faces that delivered the news remained handsome, beautiful, beaming. But as they descended into more mudslinging, their portrait of America became deformed and demonic. Liberals were “godless” and “stinking scum.” Conservatives were “right-wing lunatics” and “conservative fuckwads.” Now, however, there was an alternative to shut up, Shut UP, SHUUUUTTTTTT UPPPPPPPPPP! There was Stephen Colbert.