Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness Read Online Free PDF Page A

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