Since there’s been such an unbelievable dearth of Colbert goodness in the news lately, I’m digging back into the archives. Here’s a pretty basic Q&A from March of 2004, complete with photos of Stephen at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater (via LJ user Shana‘s links).
Stephen Colbert
March 29, 2004Stephen Colbert is the familiar stone-faced senior correspondent whose cracking wise has set the standard at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Alongside his former Second City main stage players Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, Colbert created two subversively funny, off-kilter programs; for HBO Productions, the sketch-based Exit 57 and Strangers With Candy, Comedy Central’s first original sit-com series. In 2003, the trio returned to the stage with an adaptation of their book Wigfield, a profile of “the can do town that just may not” as seen through its resident’s eyes.
As if that’s not enough, Colbert was a writer/performer on The Dana Carvey Show and can be heard as the voice of Ace, one half of the Ambiguously Gay Duo on Robert Smigel’s SNL TV Funhouse segments.
Conversation Highlights
“I went to Northwestern and studied theater there for two years, and so I assumed that I was going to be a dramatic actor. I wore a lot of black, or at least the same color top and bottom, green, blue, and the boots to match, and a little eye shadow, and I had long hair and a beard. And I was a poet slash jerk and I shared my misery with people in what I thought was a very appetizing way.”
Did you wear a beret?
(laughs) “Yes! No! A tam o’ shanter! For those of you who don’t know it is a plaid beret with a puffy ball on top. Which really is, because I was so uncool, and didn’t even know the vocabulary of coolness, even like the false vocabulary of coolness, that I didn’t perceive that in any way as diminishing from my hip. It was the ’80s, man, anything goes, I didn’t wear ties, I wore a brooch. Yeah man, parachute pants, chemical warfare shirts, my sunglasses flipped up and there was no lens, they just flipped up.”
Original photos from Inside Joke
Thanks for that.
Everytime I read an interview with Stephen, I have to look something up. Wood lathe? How random.
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Oh my god. How had I not seen this before? That is awesome. Thanks for that.
And hey, according to TvShowsOnDvd.com, the Whose Line is it Anyway episode with Stephen is coming out on the second DVD volume of the series. Barely Stephen news, but Stephen news nonetheless!
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Eye shadow! Sun glasses flipped up with no lens!
*dies*
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Hee! Glad I managed to find material that’s new to you!
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This quote re: SWC killed me.
…because the week after that I found myself vomiting, weeping and quoting scripture because I’d spent three years trying to think of the worst possible choices anyone could ever make, morally, for every character, for three years, …and I thought Strangers with Candy was actually corrupting my soul at some level…
OMG, to even have such a worry shows he’s such a thoroughly good and sensitive soul, bless him.
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Thank you for posting that. That was totally new to me. Great interview.
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RE; ‘vomiting,weeping,quoting scripture”=but thats sooooo Chuck Noblet!!
*Ooops*
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Wow, I had never seen this before either. Thanks!
And I also had to look up wood lathe. Haha.
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Old interviews with new info are a little ray of sunshine. :D Oh, man, the clothes he describes…
Re: the SWC quote– D’aw.
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@ Hard Done
You’re right! Maybe he was having us on or he was still being Noblet.;D
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Those clothes! Parachute pants and a brooch … goodness the 80s were a hideous fashion decade.
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