by Bruce Watson
Whatever the reason, suddenly the short, quiet, nerdy Stephen Colbert became the most popular funnyman in his prep school. Joining the debate team and the glee club, winning the lead in school plays, he charmed teachers and students alike. He was, one teacher remembered, “brilliant, a little naughty, and supercharged with energy.” He was, in short, the Stephen Colbert we see on TV today - minus the seasoning.
The seasoning began in college. Most of the Colberts attended the University of South Carolina, but Stephen’s mediocre grades kept him out. Instead, he chose the ultra-conservative, all-male Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. The oldest private college in the South, it was as stilted as its motto: “Come here as boys so you may leave as men.” Hampden-Sydney’s football team, fraternities, and nineteenth-century curriculum gave Colbert insight into the mainstream American values he now so sarcastically champions, but he hated his two years there.
“It was a ‘playtime’s over’ kind of place,” he recalled. Sullen and depressed, he lost fifty pounds and sank into “belated grieving.” He found an outlet by acting in plays. One was the darkly comic and oddly titled, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. Colbert remembered thinking, “This is for me. Dark farce.” Serious about acting, he even did a nude scene at the Spoleto Festival. At the request of Ken Russell, the controversial director of Women in Love and other films, he stood alone on stage naked in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Someone so dedicated to acting did not belong at a strict, southern men’s college. So, as he approached his junior year, Colbert began looking for theater schools. Among the best, he learned, was Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Colbert applied and was accepted.
Like Hampden-Sydney, Northwestern had football and fraternities, but it was also just a short “L” train ride from Chicago where a young wit could watch seasoned pros stretch themselves on the rack of comedy improvisation. Though he came north to become a dramatic actor, it would be in improv’s fantasy world - lightning fast, unpredictable, and as combative as anything out of Tolkien - that the southern Catholic Stephen Colbert would make his name. And that name would differ from the family moniker.
On the plane to Chicago, Colbert decided to soften his surname. Bumped up to first class, he struck up a conversation with his seatmate, an astronaut. He told the man he was on his way to a new school, a new life. “Oh, wow!” the astronaut said, “you could really reinvent yourself out there.” “When the plane took off I was Colbert,” Stephen recalled, “and when the plane landed, I was Colbear.” Forever after, the “t” would be silent, but it would take years before the man who made it that way learned to speak from his gut.
“Attack life, it’s going to kill you anyway.”
Every member of Colbert Nation has a favorite interview. There was the time Colbert flattered Fox News’ loudmouth Bill O’Reilly by telling him, “I’m living your book,” then held up a copy with a discount sticker over O’Reilly’s face. Then there was the time Colbert puzzled children’s author Maurice Sendak by suggesting a sequel to Where the Wild Things Are. Subtitled Still Wilding, the book would star Vin Diesel, with tie-ins to Burger King or Taco Bell. And then there was the time Colbert challenged rock-star Jack White to a “Catholic Throwdown” in which the two stumbled through hymns, debated dogma, and posed “gotcha” questions about obscure saints.
COLBERT: “Who’s the patron saint of ummm . . . clowns?”
WHITE: “Who’s the patron saint of clowns? Maybe Saint Joseph?”
COLBERT: “St. Genesius!”
WHITE: “Really? I don’t think that’s a real saint.”
Most news/talk shows use interviews as a tired, but time-tested ritual. Don’t have much to say? Get a guest without much to say. But in Colbert’s hands, interviews are adventures, and may St. Genesius - who is, in fact, the Catholic patron saint of clowns - help any guest who walks blindly into a Stephen Colbert interview. One of the first was Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler in 2006. Proudly representing Florida’s 19th District in The Colbert Report segment, “Better Know a District,” Wexler began by boasting about his constituents. He looked forward to softball questions, but Colbert became Colbert. First, he suggested drilling for oil off the coast of Florida. When Wexler rejected that idea, Colbert asked whether he supported drilling in Alaska.
WEXLER: “No.”
COLBERT: “So caribou are more important than my SUV?”
WEXLER: “No, no. . . .”
COLBERT: “But that’s what you just said.”
WEXLER: “What’s most important is that your SUV be required to have better efficiency in the future.”
COLBERT: “What if I could make it run on caribou meat? Would you be in favor of that?”
WEXLER: “On caribou meat?”
COLBERT: “Caribou meat. Or hide, doesn’t matter. Or bone.”
WEXLER: “Probably not.”
COLBERT: “Why?”
WEXLER: “Because we’d have to kill all the caribou to get you to drive your SUV.”
COLBERT: “So caribou are more important than my SUV.”
WEXLER: “No, I think we can have both. . . .”
COLBERT: “So why can’t I kill them and grind them up and put them in my SUV?”
WEXLER: “Because I think we can have both caribou and SUVS that get better gas mileage.”
COLBERT: “Let’s move on here. . . .”
Moving on, Colbert asked the congressman to complete the sentences: “I enjoy cocaine because. . . .” and “I enjoy the company of prostitutes for the following reasons. . . .”
Politicians and professors, rock stars and renowned experts, Colbert has outdueled them all. His innate intelligence is one reason, but Colbert learned to wing it in the best possible schools – Chicago stages.
Improvisational comedy, the art of turning a single audience suggestion into a full-fledged skit on the fly, made its American debut in Chicago. In the late 1940s, drama teacher Viola Spolin began giving young actors a series of “theater games” that demanded quickness and a stifling of the internal monitor that keeps most of us quiet. “Shut off the mind,” Spolin taught. “When the rational mind is shut off, we have the possibility of intuition.” The trick to improv, she maintained, is “to get out of the head.” The trick went on stage in 1959 when Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, opened a small nightclub in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. The club was called the Second City, and American comedy has never been the same.
Before Second City, comedy remained in the shadow of vaudeville and radio. On TV, aging vaudevillians such as George Burns, Bob Hope, and Red Skelton turned up on show after show, and sitcoms like Ozzie and Harriet, Our Miss Brooks, and The Jack Benny Show were nothing more than old radio serials performed before the cameras. Second City changed all that. To its small stage came the wits who would take American comedy into the age of Saturday Night Live. Their names are still legendary in comedic circles - Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, David Steinberg, and Robert Klein. Then came the next generation, some from a Second City spin-off in Toronto - John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, and Martin Short.
By 1984, when Colbert transferred to Northwestern, Second City’s legacy on Saturday Night Live was widely known. Colbert, however, had little time for comedy. He may have been witty back in South Carolina, but in Chicago he would be – ahem - an actor. In drama classes at Northwestern, he was known not for his humor but his intensity and occasional rage. One professor, frightened by his anger in a scene, suggested he seek therapy. In another instance, Colbert nearly broke an actor’s hand during a rehearsal. “I had a short fuse back then,” he remembers. “I was a real poet-slash-jerk.”
Northwestern, a Big Ten university on the windy shores of Lake Michigan, subjected the young man from South Carolina to a series of culture shocks. Raised a prim and proper Catholic, Colbert was now living in a co-ed dorm, meeting openly gay students and suffering through long, frigid winters. “Minus 70 wind c
hill,” he recalled. “Minus 39 regular one night.” Colbert defended himself with attitude, growing a beard, wearing black turtlenecks, replacing his slow, Southern demeanor with a crisp, academic gravity. Yet he also worked tirelessly, waiting tables, acting in dramas, studying ballet and method acting, and completing a three-year curriculum in just two.
One night during Colbert’s junior year, a friend took him to an improv theater in downtown Chicago. Though it was not Second City, the show opened Colbert to the adventure of improv. He considered Second City “a little cult,” so he decided to form his own improv troupe at Northwestern. Made up not just of theater majors, but also engineering and math students, too, the “No Fun Mud Piranhas” had plenty of fun, even competing in a nationwide improv competition. Yale won, but Colbert became still more serious about improv. He began studying with Del Close, a celebrated teacher at Chicago’s ImprovOlympic. Known for his temper and fierce devotion to his art, Close taught Colbert to “jump down the rabbit hole.” In other words, let the skit unfold, Colbert recalled, while “being willing to surrender what your plan was for the discovery of the moment.” But while other comedians abandoned the characters they had played as class clowns, Colbert took an alternate route. He drew on his vast reading and the lessons learned in his intellectual family. “The smarter you are, the better you’re going to be at this work,” said Charna Halpern, one of Colbert’s first improv teachers. “Stephen was so aware of the world around him that he could talk about anything.”
When Colbert graduated in 1986, he watched fellow theater grads head for New York or Los Angeles. But now torn between improv and dramatic acting, he chose to stay in Chicago. He still scorned Second City, considering its polished skits less than pure forms of the art, but after a year of waiting tables, tending bar, and auditioning for stage roles he did not get, Colbert became less particular. He began to question his goal of becoming a serious actor. When he blew a line in Hamlet, fellow actors were icy, but when he blew a line in a skit, everyone laughed anyway.
A job building furniture offered no future, and a soul-searching swing through Europe just made him lonely. Finally, in 1987, broke, discouraged, sleeping on a friend’s floor, he jumped at the chance to work in the Second City box office. The work was menial, but it had one significant perk - free improv classes. Colbert was soon living in a loft, selling tickets, and learning to “get out of the head.” He survived another Chicago winter, and in August 1988, his hard work and intelligent wit earned him a place in the Second City touring company.
Second City thrives on zaniness. Each of its revues, though given one clever title, is a montage of quick sketches, with the audience asked to focus attention stage left, right, or center. Two or three players act out sketches lasting two or three minutes before the action shifts again. Second City can be equally frenetic offstage, where performers can “get out of the head” in more ways than one. Drugs and alcohol are no strangers to the company. Where in a motley crew of overgrown boys and girls would a socially conservative son of the South fit?
Colbert enjoyed Second City. “I liked the fact that a lot of people who worked there were sort of damaged,” he said, but would its audiences enjoy Colbert? At first, he confined his roles to “high-status fools,” tight-lipped, moralistic men who were “shocked, shocked” at the antics going on around them. A Polaroid photo of Colbert taken at the Second City Training Center shows how perfectly he fit the part. While others training with him were sassy (Amy Sedaris) or sloppy (Chris Farley), the Polaroid of Colbert captures him in striped shirt and dark tie, clean-cut, sober, more likely to be hired by a bank than an improv troupe. Fellow Second City hires instantly recognized his intelligence, but would he ever loosen up?
“I was very ‘actorly,’ because I had gone to theater school,” Colbert admitted. “And I was very controlled. I was all about planning.” Fellow comics soon decided to take Colbert down a notch. His boast that he had never broken up onstage was an irresistible challenge. It wasn’t long before Amy Sedaris took the challenge.
Amy, younger sister of the author David Sedaris, was just beginning her career. Though she was lovely enough to be a Hollywood star, the offbeat humor she shared with her brother inspired characters she created with wigs and gaudy makeup. Hearing Colbert’s boast of his onstage composure, Sedaris vowed to make him lose it. When a song the two were singing called for her to smile, she revealed a set of hideous false teeth. Colbert cracked up, managed to finish the song, then ran backstage to crack up in a different way.
“I fucking blew offstage and went and locked myself in the bathroom like a teenage girl and banged my head against the wall with rage.” Sedaris and another troupe member, Paul Dinello, heard the banging and stood at the door, shouting, “Hey, you cryin’?” The mocking continued for a few minutes. When he emerged, embarrassed but composed, Colbert saw that anger worked better as an act than as a lifestyle. “They completely won,” he said. “I’m forever grateful that they broke me.”
From that evening on, Colbert, Sedaris, and Dinello were inseparable. The working-class Dinello and the courtly Colbert overcame initial resentments, and with the help of the wacky Sedaris, teamed up to create wilder and wilder skits. “They were the magic trio,” said Second City veteran Dave Razowski. Dinello and Sedaris were a couple, but they did not mind Colbert tagging along. And whenever Colbert got too serious - he was still auditioning for dramatic roles - Sedaris and Dinello talked him back into comedy. Sedaris was Colbert’s female foil, and Dinello was the anti-Colbert. Raised in gritty Chicago, he projected a brash stupidity that contrasted with Colbert’s prim fools. By 1990, calling themselves “The Three Idiots,” Colbert, Dinello, and Sedaris had improvised their way from Second City’s touring troupe to Second City e.t.c., a branch theater in northwest Chicago. Still not the Mainstage in Old Town, but getting close.
As he grew more confident, Colbert also became more social. Since his blossoming in prep school junior year, he had been a jokester around women, but rarely a suitor. He met no women at all-male Hampden-Sydney and was too busy to date much at Northwestern. Only when he started taking classes at Second City did he begin to take the opposite sex seriously. After going out with several, he stayed with one until she demanded a deeper commitment. During the spring of 1990, he flew to Charleston to talk to his mother about this ultimatum. While there, he went to an opera at the historic Dock Street Theater in the antebellum heart of the city. During intermission, he spotted her.
The lobby of the theater is Charleston’s finest, with plush carpet, colonial staircases, and a posh crowd in gowns and tuxes. But even among such elegance, one woman caught Colbert’s attention. “I walk in, and I see this woman across the lobby and I thought, ‘That one. Right there.’” He told himself he was crazy, but he strode across the lobby and introduced himself. They had much in common. Evelyn McGee, like Colbert, was from a distinguished Charleston family. Her father was a prominent lawyer in the city and had served in the state’s House of Representatives. Evelyn had gone to prep school, enjoyed theater, had done some acting, and was a fan of the poet E.E. Cummings.
Perhaps Colbert impressed her by mentioning that he had appeared in a Chicago production of Cummings’ memoir, The Enormous Room. Perhaps he did not need to impress her that way. She may have already sensed how kind and generous he is, how smart he is. The two talked throughout intermission, met again after the opera, and when Colbert returned to Chicago, they began a long-distance courtship. In those days, that meant letters and late-night phone calls. Luckily, Colbert was up late, thanks to his job.
Second City thrives on teamwork, its actors following one of Viola Spolin’s principles to “always agree, always go along” with a skit as it unfolds. The phrase Second City lives by is, “yes, and. . . .” Once welcomed to the troupe’s stage, Colbert found it easy to say “yes.” His penchant for playing straight-laced fools was a good fit with the team, earning him roles in Ku Klux Klambake, Destiny, and How to Avoid It, and Where’s Your God N
ow, Charlie Brown?
By 1991, however, Second City’s reputation had become a handicap. How could the troupe that spawned Nichols and May, Belushi and Ackroyd, Martin Short and now Mike Myers be as funny as it once was? Chicago critics had tired of the troupe. Second City, the Chicago Reader wrote, “is not in business to change the world; it’s here to sell drinks, give the audience a couple of chuckles, and send them home with a smile and a good buzz.” But even the staunchest critics had to admit that every Second City show had its moments. Colbert provided one when he dreamed up a black woman as his alter ego.
By 1992, Colbert had moved from Second City e.t.c. to its Mainstage in Old Town Chicago. His first job there was as understudy to Steve Carell, who would later star with him on The Daily Show before going on to The Office. Carell, like Colbert, had grown up in a prim Catholic family and was getting laughs by acting clueless. In early 1993, after watching poet Maya Angelou read at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, Colbert began thinking, “I wish I was an old black woman! They have so much character.”
With that inspiration, Colbert and Carell crafted a sketch that sent the two headed back to their southern hometowns. The sketch had them riding a train, discussing how great it was to be back home, waxing nostalgic until they stepped onto the platform. A woman then approached Colbert, calling him Shirley Wentworth. Reviving his southern accent, he responded in kind, spewing phrases like, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry to hear that,” and “I love you, too, darlin’.” Turning to Carell, Colbert said, “I forgot to tell you. When I’m home, I’m an old black woman.”