Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Last night, Stephen Colbert said goodbye to his CBS series The Late Show, a show he's hosted since 2015 and which will not continue without him. But in getting to that job, Stephen Colbert has compiled a fairly unusual career path as both a writer and performer of comedy. Stephen Colbert loved both from the start, especially comic improv.
He started out as Steve Carell's understudy for the touring company of Chicago's Second City and teamed with him on some of his early short-lived TV work, most infamously on ABC's The Dana Carvey Show in 1996. That outrageous comedy series included animated shorts starring a pair of superheroes called the Ambiguously Gay Duo.
Colbert co-wrote those cartoons and provided the voice of Ace, one of the costumed crime fighters. The voice of his sidekick, Gary, was provided by Steve Carell. After the Dana-Carvey show was canceled, the ambiguously gay duo was picked up by Saturday Night Live.
Look both ways before crossing the street. And always hold hands with your buddy. The buddy system should be used in all potentially unsafe situations, like swimming, bike riding, and showering.
Colbert joined Comedy Central's The Daily Show in 1997 when it was hosted by Craig Kilbourne. But Colbert, like the show, really blossomed when Jon Stewart became host in 1999 and made the show more political. Colbert played himself, but in the guise of a conservative correspondent, improvising in character from a right-wing point of view.
But, Stephen, you're probably being recorded as saying, doesn't all this government's fine-run citizens mean losing our basic freedoms? Of course not. It means gaining limits on those freedoms, something Uncle Sam likes to call Freedom Plus.
As that character, also named Stephen Colbert, he reported for Comedy Central from national political conventions in 2000 and 2004, and eventually got his own spin-off series, The Colbert Rapport, which ran from 2005 to 2014.
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Chapter 2: What career milestones did Stephen Colbert achieve before The Late Show?
In the last year of that series, a campaign was launched to get Colbert thrown off the air, which he discussed on his own show, as always, in character. But folks, I'm not going to lie.
This was close. We almost lost me. I'm never going to take me for granted ever again.
But Colbert persevered and found an even more powerful platform. In 2015, he was selected for the late show job when Letterman retired and dropped his conservative persona to host this CBS network show as himself. The next year, in 2016, he hosted a live election night cable special on Showtime, subtitled Democracy's Series Finale.
It was planned and written with the expectation that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump in the national election. But as the evening wore on, even though the race had yet to be called, Colbert reacted in real time to the surprising voting trends.
I think we can agree that this has been an absolutely exhausting, bruising election for everyone. That's right. And it has come to an ending that I did not imagine. We all now feel the way Rudy Giuliani looks. Seeing this election... Seeing this election, you know, people all around the world. I mean, she's going off to Portugal. Everybody's saying, has America lost its mind?
And the answer is evidently back off, buddy. We got 300 million guns and we're kind of stressed right now. By every metric. I mean, we are more divided than ever as a nation.
After 11 years as host, Stephen Colbert closed shop on The Late Show this week, cleverly and memorably. On Wednesday's show, for example, he finally answered his own Colbert questionnaire, with different celebrities coming on stage to pose each question. Even when finally shining the spotlight on himself, he found a way to include and engage others.
And Bruce Springsteen closed that night's show by singing Streets of Minneapolis, using his voice and protesting to the end, just as Stephen Colbert has. Terry Gross has interviewed and been interviewed by Stephen Colbert several times over the years.
To honor his reign on The Late Show, we're revisiting their conversation from November 2016, which took place just before his live Showtime special. At that time, he had been hosting The Late Show for about a year. They began with an excerpt of the opening monologue from the night before.
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Chapter 3: How did Stephen Colbert transition from The Colbert Report to The Late Show?
I don't know if I want to be doing this.
Well, yeah. I mean, you have to give that some thought. But I also knew that if someone wants to hire me or if I can get my own production company together or create my own project, you can act anytime you want. This opportunity will never come again. And I love a live audience. And I love the grind of every day. And I love the people I work with. And it gave me all the things that I loved.
And that was not a hard decision. Once I looked at that, I could leave the thing that I didn't want to do anymore and still keep all the aspects of it that gave me deep satisfaction every day.
I mean, the release, the privilege it is to do a show about what just happened in the last 24 hours or the last hour or the last half hour, given the speed of the news cycle right now, in front of a live studio audience, which feels so happy to be there with people that you love working with, who are all pulling on the same rope, is a drug, right?
And as hard as it is, I get that great release at the end of the day to be in front of the audience. And to know that I can continue that with my friends was the greatest draw. And I also couldn't think of anything after the Colbert Report that would seem like a promotion other than taking over for Dave. And so I said, what a fool I would be to not – to accept this incredible –
Because I can act till the day I die if I want to, but I can only do this now.
When you started doing The Late Show, as opposed to The Colbert Report, and you were able to drop the Colbert Report persona, did you know what your authentic voice was going to be? You know, what your voice is like the actual Stephen Colbert was going to be? Because you still have to have like a bit of a persona as an entertainer on stage.
I don't think so. I knew that it would be a little bit of a public discovery. It's somebody else's joke, but life is like learning to play the violin in public. You don't know what you're doing until you do it. And I knew that there'd be a learning curve that had to happen in public on air. I would say that what I didn't anticipate was... how much I would overcorrect for not doing the character.
What do you mean?
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