The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [115]
The bit accomplished something rare in the clubby atmosphere of Washington politics and press: It disturbed people. Colbert was only vaguely aware that night of the stir he was causing, by his audience’s avoiding making eye contact with him. But over the next few days he got the message. He had dared disturb the universe, and the level of opprobrium he attracted stunned him. “I didn’t want to be subversive,” he said. “I just wanted to be funny.” Still, for every accusation hurled at him of having violated the dinner’s unspoken code of gentlemanliness, there were an equal number of plaudits from fans who realized that they now had their own champion of truthiness.
In many ways, Colbert was closer to O’Brien in background and training than anyone else in late night: never a stand-up, intellectually gifted, and balls-out fearless in pursuit of a laugh. Born in Washington, D.C., almost exactly a year after Conan, and raised on James Island near Charleston, South Carolina, Stephen Tyrone Colbert was also Irish Catholic, from a huge family, and the son of a doctor. Conan tried tap; Stephen tried ballet.
What separated them—really what separated Colbert from almost everyone else in his youth—was a tragedy. When he was ten, his father and the two brothers closest to him in age (he had eleven siblings in all) were killed in a plane crash on their way to enroll the boys in a boarding school. Colbert could never fully calculate the devastation that the loss wrought, on his family or his own young psyche.
Stephen all but shut down academically, turning instead to fantasy books, which he escaped into by devouring them at breakneck pace. “Nothing seemed important after that,” Colbert said of the tragedy, a feeling that sparked a lifelong resistance to “blind acceptance of authority.” He felt detached from the standard interests and behavior of children. Nothing a teacher could say could inspire any discipline, because after what had happened to his family “nothing seemed threatening to me.” He did try to make his mother laugh, as humor was respected, even valued in the family. But the young Colbert wanted to be less ham than Hamlet, “so I could share my misery with the world.”
He started at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he finally got a little serious about using his intellect—when he wasn’t consumed by playing Dungeons and Dragons, which he later credited with fueling his character-creation skills. After two years he transferred to Northwestern to chase his serious acting muse.
On his flight to Chicago to enroll, he fell into conversation with a fellow passenger—an unnamed astronaut, in Colbert’s telling—and described how his dad at one time considered shifting the second syllable of their name to the French pronunciation, but didn’t out of deference to his own father, “who lacked the pretentious gene I have.” Advised by his seatmate to go for it if he really wanted to change his life, COLE-burt landed in Chicago as Cole-BEAR.
Acting at Northwestern, he discovered that he appreciated comic roles—and being around the funnier people—more than that grim, tragic stuff. After trying other groups in Chicago, Colbert eventually signed on to the famous Second City improv troupe and truly found his form. He met some significant future contacts there, including Steve Carell (Colbert became his understudy) and Amy Sedaris. With Amy and Paul Dinello, Colbert went on to create a sketch comedy show for Comedy Central in 1995, Exit 57. (Later the threesome would also launch the surreal series Strangers with Candy for the channel, which gained a cult following, mainly for Sedaris.)
Though Colbert had not quite broken through, he was finding a consistent theme for his characters: totally sure of themselves and completely ignorant, or as he put it, “poorly informed, high-status idiots.” Something about that combination