Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness Read Online Free PDF

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 Cityveterans.
    “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