Word: colbert
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...person, Colbert is quite unlike his braying pundit. He's soft-spoken and reflective--tweedy, almost--and the father of three young kids. (His show persona, he says, wouldn't be a good dad. "The kids have to be more important than you.") Born in Charleston, S.C., he studied theater at Northwestern University and then did improv work with Chicago's Second City troupe--a pursuit, he says, not unrelated to his childhood addiction to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. He also developed a news habit. As a young actor, he would stay up until 4 a.m. watching...
Many people, Colbert included, were worried that that guy would be too much to take for 30 minutes. (Then again, people blow a full hour on Bill O'Reilly.) But Colbert inhabits his pose so lustily--"I've just swallowed 20 condoms full of truth, and I'm smuggling them across the border!"--that his glee is infectious. Like the band Weezer or The O.C.'s Seth Cohen, he is in the grand modern tradition of the swaggering nerd. (The nerd part, by the way, is not unautobiographical. An ardent Lord of the Rings fan, Colbert is the proud owner...
...tougher than it may look. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart essentially plays himself and shares the lifting with correspondents. Colbert is on camera nearly the entire show. He not only gives editorials but also does interviews in character. Like The Daily Show, the Report can be patchy once it gets past the monologue. But some segments are tours de force, like Formidable Opponent, in which Colbert debates himself; rather than tape both sides separately, he toggles between pro and con like a human Ping-Pong match...
Stewart has an inherently likable role, our bemused Virgil in the Inferno of media clichés. Colbert plays the devil himself: the millionaire pundit pretending to stand up for the little guy. He can even demagogue astronomy. When astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson told him Pluto should not be considered a planet, Colbert debated him thusly: "Isn't that just East Coast liberal intellectual ... did you go to an Ivy League school?" "Yes, I did." "... Ivy League-- educated people telling us what is or isn't a planet...
There's an obvious political spin to that caricature--recall the 2004 election, when the Bush campaign positioned itself against ivory-tower liberal élites. Colbert's persona has a conservative bent: in his words, he's a reflexive "Blame America last-er" and has a dog named Gipper. But Colbert is also spoofing the general trend in news to pander to emotion, to value graphics over thinking, gut over brain. "That, I think, is the nutmeat of the show," he tells me. "Enough mind. We tried mind for a long time, and what has it gotten us? You know...