Stephen the King
This a love letter to a man. This is love in its most honest form. This is admiration, respect, and honor rolled up into that four-letter word. This is us telling you that truly, madly, deeply, we love Stephen Colbert.
A bit of a primer if you’re thinking we meant some other Stephen: Mr. Colbert (pronounced “Col-bertâ€) is a comedian who hosts his own late-night talk show called The Colbert Report (pronounced “Col-bear Repore,†really). It might be referred to as a talk show but in actuality it is a 30-minute twisted version of all those political talk shows like The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity. The whole show is heightened parody. It’s not the basic slapstick caricature but instead sheds a humorous light on current events and the “journalists†who report on them.
Stephen Colbert plays a right-wing self-centered egotist pundit named Stephen Colbert (his persona’s last name follows the show’s pronunciation of Col-ber, because you know, it’s classier). A character who reports the news he wants to report the way he wants to report it. Even when welcoming his guests, Colbert is the one parading and waving to the crowd as his guest sits down, waiting for him to finish his theatrics. It’s that kind of song and dance that makes his comedy so special. Add to the fact that he’s won an Emmy for The Colbert Report, a Grammy for his album A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All, as well as writing three best-selling books, I Am America (And So Can You!), I Am A Pole (And So Can You!), and America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t, just shows that Colbert is far from a one-trick pony.
What makes Colbert stand out from the pack is the fact that he doesn’t let the ghosts and legacies of comedians past weigh him down. Leno, Letterman, and O’Brien one way or another are trying to live up to the Olympian standards of the late-great Johnny Carson. While it is an admirable pursuit, that’s not what Colbert has been doing. His fresh approach to the late-night setup has made him a real modern day comedian.
The character Colbert is not the everyman Jay Leno keeps telling the world he is. He’s not the fun-loving uncle Letterman brilliantly and consistently welcomes his audience as. It’s not the geeky and awkward host Conan O’Brien has built a name on. When most of these hosts try so hard to be the person the audience thinks they want them to be, Colbert risks it all by giving them someone the mass/commercial market might reject. Despite the gamble, Colbert has become something of a cult icon; equaling and maybe even surpassing his “mentor†Jon Stewart in terms of mainstream recognition. Last we checked, Colbert has been on the cover of Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ (twice), Newsweek, Wired, Vanity Fair, and even Sports Illustrated.
The Colbert Report in its close-to-a-decade run only had two sudden breaks in its broadcast. The first was when he had to rush back to his home state to visit his ailing mother. The second time he left the show was for him to say goodbye to her. On his first show after the death of his mother, he broke character and decided to share the life he had with his mom. It’s that man, the man with so much love, the man who’s center is his family, more so than the comedian performing every night at 11:30, this real Stephen Colbert is the one we want to be.
Anyone who’s seen The Colbert Report could easily become a fan but what makes us so obsessed with him is his real self: who he is underneath the character. Colbert first and foremost is a man with the biggest of hearts. And he only breaks his “right-wing character†when something as important as family or, as recently shown, the Boston Marathon bombing happens. It’s at moments like these where you see Colbert as a man full of heart, a performer who gives everything to his audience, and a writer with so much emotion who’s so brilliant even when he’s not being funny.
Colbert proves that comedy need not be pointless or vain or dumb or cruel. Similar to Louis CK who turns the dredge and dark into wonderful and always humorous parables, Colbert’s comedy twists the over-importance media places upon itself on its head and offers a moral lesson underneath all that wit. His show and his character is a reflection of what we hate most about the media. It is smart satire that’s both fluid in its delivery and solid in its message.
It’s easy to see, yet still so awe-inspiring, how much thought he puts in his jokes and it’s the kind of humor that gets better and better every time you hear it. If there was such a thing as a comedic poet, that would be Colbert. Above all, Stephen Colbert gives a sense of optimism in everything he does. Whether it be on his show, in his books, or his music, the spirit and energy he puts into it is never meant to be anything but uplifting. So to paraphrase the man himself, thank you so much, Stephen, good to have you with us.
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You can stream episodes of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report over at www.colbernation.com.
