Interview with Jay Katsir, writer for ‘The Colbert Report’

I put this link in the Zeitgeist post, but I really don’t want it to get lost in the shuffle. This article, featured in the Northwestern University paper, features Jay Katsir, one of the Colbert Report writers. It’s one of the best interviews I’ve read/heard about a writer (next to the Allison Silverman interview). Here’s some of the more interesting bits:

Interview with Jay Katsir, writer for The Colbert Report.
By Mindy Zacharjasz
October 20, 2006 at 3:48 pm · Filed under Articles, Multimedia

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How do you come up with ideas?

A lot of the ideas are developed collaboratively when we have our meetings in the morning. It’s open for people to talk about and propose different angles on a topic. Sometimes you’re assigned to come up with an outline but often you’ll just get a general topic, and the specific ideas that turn into the jokes are a result of the collaborative process of bouncing jokes off each other and ideas off each other. It’s something your constantly aware of, needing to come up with jokes for things. The ideas are all filtered through Stephen’s character’s point of view. If something comes up, it becomes more natural after a while to know what Stephen’s character’s opinion would be.

So, what’s it like working for Stephen Colbert?

It’s great, I mean I really love the job and I really like working with everyone there. It’s like a regime of niceness from the top down. I think the stereotype for late night comedy shows is a competitive atmosphere, but I personally feel like it’s a very supportive, collaborative and positive atmosphere. That comes from Stephen all the way down. It’s pretty great. He’s a really nice guy. He’s nothing like his character.

How do you come up with The Word?

Since The Word is more or less an essay where the arguments are comprised of jokes, you have to see a story, and then normally you know what Stephen’s opinion would be, and then you want to develop an outline where he is sort of taking the idea and heightening it, maybe proposing some sort of absurd extension to it. Coming up with The Word is difficult and it’s a very deliberate process. You would find it very similar to writing an essay for school, except you can put in wacky jokes.

How do you pick The Word?

Sometimes you come up with an idea in the course of writing it, sometimes it’s clear from the very beginning, sometimes the actual word itself is integral to the argument, sometimes it’s just a way of getting into it. It depends on how you think it will best serve the overall piece. Sometimes the temptation is to come up with a neologism, like make up a crazy word, but I think that has to be done only when it really serves a piece.

So you wrote the Wikiality bit. What was the background?

We’ve done a bunch of things where we’ve asked viewers to respond to pieces on the show. I think this is one of the first ones where we realized that we could really engender a response, at least on the internet, when we ask for things on the show.

We did it as a joke—it wasn’t necessarily conceived as something that would have a major reaction on Wikipedia. But we figured we’d throw it in and see what happened and then I remember we checked Wikipedia the next day—we talked about at the morning meeting how surprisingly large the response was.

At the top of the show, the joke he made to introduce the topic that he later talked about in The Word was “I’ll do a report on Wikipedia which you’ll be able to read online on Wikipedia in about 10 minutes.” And then, when I check Wikipedia the next day, in reality it took about three minutes.

That was pretty exciting and cool and, in certain ways, scary. We had no idea so much vandalism would occur.

Full Text of Article

And here’s the coolest part – in the Comments section of the article, you can write questions for Jay. At the end of the article, it says, “Have questions for Jay Katsir? Leave a comment, and he’ll respond over the next week or so.” I asked a question I’ve been seriously curious about for a while now:

Since you were at the Emmys, I figure you might know the answer to a question about Jon and Stephen’s Emmy speech. How much of that was scripted or prewritten, and how much did it deviate from the original speech to incorporate the Barry Manilow win and the dual-Emmy win for Jon? Were the writers and Jon/Stephen frantically writing in their seats as the evening progressed, or was there some kind of pre-written sketch. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question – I’ve been seriously curious about it ever since the Emmys.

I then proceeded to type this site in as NoFactZone.com. Duh. And then I saw that this pinged back to the article’s comments, except I called it the Northwest University paper. (I’ve fixed it.) Don’t let me operate any heavy machinery tonight, seriously. I need to make a rule- no commenting after Midnight, as my brain turns into a pumpkin. Anyway, so if you have questions, submit them to the comments section of this article and we’ll see if they get answered.