When news broke that CBS had selected Stephen Colbert to replace David Letterman, who is retiring next year, as host of the “Late Show,” there arose an urgent question: Would Colbert be bringing his reactionary, ultra-right-wing pundit character with him from Comedy Central? The answer, swiftly reported, was no: he’d be giving up the persona, and playing it straight—or at least, this being comedy, straighter. As he told Bill Carter, of the Times, “We’ll all get to find out how much of him was me.” The same day, after word of his new gig was out, he took a moment during the taping of his own show, “The Colbert Report,” to praise Letterman, and to note, maintaining his persona’s proud ignorance of all things, “I do not envy whoever they try to put in that chair.”
Colbert, a savvy entertainer, is wise to nurture this sense of mystery. But the question—Who is the real Stephen Colbert?—would only be compelling if Colbert himself hadn’t been answering it again and again for the past decade.
Colbert’s O’Reilly-Limbaugh creation has been reliably hilarious and insightful since the “The Colbert Report” débuted, in 2005. The show’s red-white-and-blue bald-eagle imagery; its hooting, chanting crowds; and the character’s own absurd self-regard have helped take the air out of Fox News, and out of the entire genre of televised political punditry. Thanks to various electioneering stunts, Colbert has made vital observations about the American political system, particularly about the sordid role that money plays within it. “The Colbert Report” and the “Daily Show,” where Colbert perfected his schtick, have changed the way that young liberals of a certain class think and talk about civic culture. And “Colbert” has been funny for nearly ten years. Fans of the show and its indomitable host (only now defeated by the real-life lure of late-night respectability) have good reason to mourn.
But “Colbert” hasn’t been performance art; Colbert has not tried to be Andy Kaufman—nor, in this particular age of sharing, could he have hoped to be. In interviews since “The Colbert Report” launched, he has been forthright about his personal life, and about the particular aims of his comedy. When Terry Gross asked him, in 2012, why he had published the faux-commentary book “America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t,” Colbert explained, “My character is based on news punditry, the masters of opinion in cable news, and they all have books.” The book, then, existed as a kind of stunt. But what he didn’t say, and didn’t need to, was that he had been paid to write a book because people in real life would buy it. This situation was at once rather complicated and completely clear: everyone on television has a book, but was Colbert really someone on television? Also in 2012, Colbert spoke to David Gregory on “Meet the Press,” and again went through the me-and-him routine. “Don’t you yank my chain around. I’m not your puppet to dance on your string, David Gregory,” he said. But, near the end of the interview, Colbert couldn’t help sounding thoughtful. When Gregory asked him about the 2012 Presidential election, and whether anything meaningful separated Barack Obama from Mitt Romney, he said, “There’s got to be a difference between these two men, or else we’re all part of a cruel, cruel joke.”
Still, there has always been a stir over the years when the integrity of the Colbert persona has appeared to be penetrated—as in 2011, when Al Gore referred to Colbert’s “character” during an interview, or, in a touching moment last year, when Colbert spoke about the death of his mother on the air. In a way, we’ve been more eager than Colbert himself to protect his conservative-host persona, not by believing explicitly in the fictional construct of the show, but by agreeing instead to act like we believe it.
It’s a testament to Colbert’s immense gifts as a performer that the character has remained fresh. But, as Colbert himself has gotten more famous, his creation has suffered. In some ways, this has created a more interesting persona, what Charles McGrath, in the New York Times Magazine, identified as a third Colbert—some hybrid of the fake and the real. But it has also muddled the meaning and purpose of the character. The clueless pundit Stephen Colbert had his finest moment all the way back in 2006, when he eviscerated George W. Bush with false praise during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (After expounding on a metaphor comparing the Bush Presidency to the movie “Rocky,” Colbert concluded, “It is the heartwarming story of a man who is repeatedly punched in the face.”) He stayed so firmly in character that he even made Antonin Scalia laugh.
Four years later, at another Washington engagement, Colbert once again arrived in character to speak to politicians. After he had become a migrant farm worker for a day in a segment on his show, Colbert was given five minutes to speak in front of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Security. To the obvious discomfort of the committee members, he offered his usual absurdist commentary: “Now we all know there is a long tradition of great nations importing foreign workers to do their farm work. After all, it was the ancient Israelites who built the first food pyramids.” He ended by saying, “I yield the balance of my time. U.S.A., number one.”
If he’d stopped there, his appearance would have been an act of subversive but straightforward political protest—mocking anti-immigration politicians for their xenophobia and tweaking Congress for its occasional attempts to spice up committee hearings by bringing in celebrity “experts.” But his testimony continued with a question-and-answer session. He had a funny exchange with Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, in which he said, “I endorse all Republican policies without question.” Then he got into an awkward spat with John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, who asked him to leave the hearing. Later, he took questions from the California Democrat Judy Chu. She asked him why he was interested in the issue of migrant labor. Here, in a telling moment, he paused, patted the back of his head with his hand, and looked away for a moment, before responding, in obvious seriousness: “I like talking about people who don’t have any power. And it seemed like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come and do our work but don’t have any rights as a result.” Colbert was thoughtful and sincere—and had ruined the whole thing. By speaking honestly, he had become the very thing he was mocking, a celebrity testifying before Congress.
Colbert’s increasing visibility over the years has made those who remain confused about him, or who don’t get the joke, all the more perplexing. That, at least at first, seemed to be at the heart of the recent #CancelColbert Twitter controversy, in which a tweet sent from an official Comedy Central account, which quoted Colbert out of context using racist language toward Asian Americans, led to backlash online. Defenders of Colbert were enraged by the seeming naiveté of many who called for Colbert’s job: it was satire, after all, and anyone who didn’t get that was a lost cause to reason. But as Jay Caspian Kang wrote about here on the site, the creator of the #CancelColbert campaign, Suey Park, was not unaware of Colbert’s satirical humor, but rather angry that he had decided to mock one form of race stereotyping by putting forth another, perhaps more socially acceptable, example of it. Regardless, Colbert’s response on his show was defiant and proud and funny—yet also communicated a measure of defensiveness about his intentions. It walked a clever line, but the whole event had led Colbert into the hybrid third-way, forcing him to use his reactionary character to shore up his own progressive bona fides.
In a perfect comedic world, we would have only known the Stephen Colbert character for the past nine years—and the real man would simply disappear when we didn’t see him, as we once imagined was true of our first-grade teachers. (The paragon in this respect is, of all people, David Letterman. For all the talk of Colbert’s mythology, it is Letterman who, despite more than thirty years on television, has remained, in many ways, unknowable.) But that’s asking too much. As Jon Stewart pointed out on Thursday, Colbert has given up a lot to play the character as strenuously as he has. It’s unlikely that CBS would have given Colbert the job if he’d been entirely persuasive as a political ideologue; by showing the cracks in the character, he has reminded us of his ability as an actor and a comedian. The important question, then, isn’t what the real Stephen Colbert is like, but what character he’ll play next. Some things are unlikely to change: his enthusiasm and showmanship, his gifts as a physical comedian, his knowing expressions of egotism—these are the tools of a talk-show host, fake or not.
Photograph by Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Corbis.
