Stephen at the New York TimesTalk on November 16

So MsInterpreted and I went to the New York Times Center last night, where journalist Deborah Solomon interviewed Stephen and did her best to keep up with his ribbing of The New York Times.

Highlights of the evening:

• Stephen hoped the writers’ strike would end “before this talk ends tonight.”
• On being denied inclusion on the Democratic ballot: They did seven 6 to 8 minute segments on campaign finance during his brief run, and those shows have become the highest-rated shows in the history of the Report. “I had teenagers tuning in to seven shows on campaign finance because we funneled it through Doritos!”
• Stephen and his producers rate their shows with a simple system: Yay, Solid, or ‘Wrench to the Head.’ Guess which one is bad.
• Politicians and public figures are making it more difficult for Stephen – and Jon – to do their jobs, simply by becoming caricatures of themselves. It’s not as easy to satirize something that’s inherently outrageous.
• Quote of the evening: “Is it sexy? Is it hard?”
• Other topics included: the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Bill O’Reilly and religion, and BEARS.

There was a book signing afterwards, so we went through the line and got a moment to speak with him (and thank you, as always, Stephen, for your kind words and welcome smile). There was also a wine reception in the lobby. Yes, it was quite sophisticated! And we wrote this summary up on the way home, in near-complete darkness lessened only by occasional streetlights and the glow of MsI’s cell phone. Seriously, I couldn’t see the page. You’re lucky this isn’t gibberish.

(Photo by haggis316 on flickr. Thanks!)

On to the painfully long recap. “It’s like listening to a podcast with your eyes!”

Stephen came out onto the stage and grimaced exaggeratedly as he slowly lowered himself into his chair. “My assistant gave me a suit to wear tonight that is from the beginning of the show, two years ago. It doesn’t fit anymore… What I’m saying is, I have a fat ass.” (Editor’s note: disagreed.) “I just set the intellectual tone for the night – the bar is very low.” He said that he does what the president does – he goes into each day with very low expectations. That way, at the end of the day, he can tell himself, “Not bad, buddy!”

They began as if they’d been bickering backstage before the talk, and Stephen ribbed Solomon the entire time about supposedly emailing him her questions before the talk. He also got more than a few jabs in at The New York Times.

Solomon: You think very highly of yourself.
Stephen: There’s an old quote in performing – If they see you loving you, they’ll love you too.

In the middle of an answer, Stephen turned his chair to face our side of the audience more fully. “I need to open up a little to this side.” (We cheered.) “Yes – they’re striking!”

Solomon: Are you aware that there’s a writers’ strike going on?
Stephen: I was wondering why my days were so empty.

Stephen hadn’t read the Variety column that mentioned the late night show hosts talking amongst themselves, and when told that ‘there was no word on The Colbert Report,’ said, “Variety needs to get better reporters. That Stephen Colbert has his name in the phone book.” Stephen has talked to Jon about the strike, though. He explained that the best scenario is for everyone to be happy, and because that is impossible, the next best scenario is for everyone to be unhappy. But that’s already happening – everyone from the writers to the staff to the additional crew is unhappy. He added that Comedy Central has been very supportive. Sometimes you have to go along with the union because that’s what organized labor is about. (Editor’s note: MsI and I interpreted this to mean that his own writers aren’t unhappy, but he understands that they’re bound by the union to go on strike.)

Solomon asked him how long he thought the strike would go on, and he said, “I hope it ends before this talk ends tonight. Everyone has this phrase – ‘If I had a crystal ball.’ Well, I don’t understand why someone hasn’t gone out and bought a crystal ball already. Would’ve saved a lot of time.”

Solomon: Were you disappointed that you only got that far [in the race]?
Stephen: We got exactly as far as we expected.

They never expected to get onto the ballot, but Stephen was really excited that it lasted for seven shows. “Every morning, noon and night I measure my days in shows.” They did seven 6 to 8 minute segments and those shows were the highest-rated shows in the history of the Report. “I had teenagers tuning in to seven shows on campaign finances because we funneled it through Doritos!” The ending was timed perfectly – he found out on a Thursday, and on Friday he had no show. The audience got to see him crushed, but hasn’t seen him moping.

People asked him if it was real or if it was a joke and he would ask in return, what’s the difference? He doesn’t understand the dichotomy between the two. Why can’t it be both? “I went down there and campaigned! I pressed the flesh! They turned me down. But they let Mike Gravel on the ballot?”

On becoming part of the political process: “We toss the pebble of the show into the puddle of reality and report on the ripples.”

Solomon mentioned Pat Paulson, but Stephen explained that Paulson ran in the general election, which is public. The primaries are private.

Solomon: So the Republicans wanted $35,000 to let you in?
Stephen: No, no, no, the Republicans wanted $35,000 and they said they’d think about it.

Solomon asked what he thought about the woman who asked John McCain how to beat Hillary Clinton, in South Carolina. Stephen’s first response: “Who is she? Give me a name, I’m probably related to her.” Solomon asked how Stephen himself would have responded, and he said, “Well, Deborah Solomon isn’t running for president.” Over the audience’s laughter, he added that she had to have given him that question in advance because there was no way he could have come up with it on the spot. She asked if he had any connections in South Carolina to help him with the campaign, and he said he had high school friends who were probably celebrating his loss.

Solomon: If you got elected President, and the White House were surrounded by bears, what would you do?
Stephen: I’d go nuke. I’d go nuke. That’s a good bumper sticker – Nuke the Bears.

Stephen the person is afraid of bears. Solomon asked, isn’t everyone? Stephen: “Who here has nightmares about black bears, grizzly bears, dancing bears?” He raised his hand. He told the story of being afraid of them as a kid, and that instead of reassuring him that there were no bears within 500 miles of his town, his dad told him that they’d be able to stitch him right up. He had to go to Yellowstone as a Daily Show correspondent to meet with a guy who let you drive your car onto his park and feed apples to his Kodiak bears (all former Hollywood performing bears). Yellowstone doesn’t let you do that anymore because some bears “peeled the cars open like sardine tins and people died.” This guy had a thin wire fence to keep the bears corraled, and Stephen asked about not standing too close to the wire, but he said, “Ah naw, that thing’s not on!” Apparently he didn’t want to injure his trained performing bears. So, not very helpful to the bear phobia. Stephen does have some great photos of himself in front of the trained bear standing on its hind legs and roaring, though.

In her belated introductory monologue, Solomon stated that Stephen had taken the bold step of doing a talk show in character, someone who looks like him and has the same name as him, but is a right-wing reactionary with a low IQ. Stephen interrupted, “No no no, he has a high IQ. He has a good mind, poorly fed.” Also, “Too many people think with their heads instead of knowing with their hearts.” Solomon asked if people had doubted whether he could keep the character up for so long, and he said his wife certainly did.

When they began the shows, they started rating them with a system: ‘Yay,’ ‘Solid,’ or ‘Wrench to the Head.’ Yay is excellent, Solid is a decent show, and Wrench to the Head is a nightmare where the rewrites are late, the jokes fall flat, the show itself is “a bear to produce” and the audience doesn’t laugh. Out of 161 shows per year, he had predicted, for example, 20 Yays, 100 Solids, and 40 Wrenches to the Head. In the first year, they produced only 18 Wrenches to the Head.

When he, Jon Stewart, and Ben Karlin were coming up with the framework for the show, they were trying to whether they should do it one night a week or all four, whether they should have an audience, and whether they should use one camera or three. They decided on four nights a week because “it’s sexy.” He told a story about how when they’re coming up with ideas for the show, they ask whether it’s sexy and whether it’s hard (and yes, he laughed when we all snickered.) That has become their motto, which is now tacked above Co-Producer Allison Silverman’s door: Is It Sexy? Is It Hard?

We watched a montage of Stephen bashing the New York Times on the show. Stephen laughed at the clips, including the one joke about the size of the paper, liberal shrinkage, and John Kerry. Once the lights had come back up, Stephen said that he’d wanted to use a joke about shrinkage in his NYT column for Maureen Dowd, who had asked him whether the column was a way of testing the waters for a presidential race. I honestly couldn’t tell you what he wanted to write, but it involved the temperature of the water and the words ‘shrinky-dink.’ Sadly, the New York Times refuses to print the word ‘shrinky-dink.’

Solomon: You did the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year – am I telling it right?
Stephen: No. (laughter) I did it in 2006. The New York Times got its facts wrong.

Stephen (very accurately describing the seating of the dinner): Helen Thomas, me, I’m sorry I don’t recall his name but the president of the AP, then Laura, the First Lady, Bush –
Solomon: You call her Laura?
Stephen: I call her Laura “First Lady” Bush. Then there was George “The President” Bush, then the White House Correspondents’ Association president. (complete with air quotes)

Solomon noted that when he started his speech, the cameras panned between him and Bush, who was smiling. After a while, they stopped panning to Bush, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop. She wanted to read that paragraph. Stephen started laughing and said, “I think I know which paragraph you mean.” She asked if he wanted to read it, and he very dryly said, “I wouldn’t do it justice.” (It was the photo op paragraph; you know the one.)

Solomon said that at that moment, he became a hero of the left, but Stephen countered that he didn’t do anything that he hadn’t already done on his show. The media covered it on the Wednesday after the weekend speech, and only because the video had been viewed or downloaded 2.6 million times on Youtube, so the media covered that and not the actual content of the speech. Stephen said he’d been really excited to do the speech, because his writers (he mentioned his writers a lot tonight, wonder why) had worked very hard on it and he thought it was very funny. And in the actual room, which was literally the size of a football field – picture three thousand people all sitting at big round banquet tables – there was much more laughter than we heard on TV. The audience wasn’t miked up because this was CSPAN and not a comedy show, and the cameras only caught the first row of tables. Here he imitated their horrified gasps and whispers. He thought it went well, but when he sat down he wondered why no one would meet his eyeline. After the dinner, an old friend of his who is now a distinguished actor came up to him and said, “That was a funny speech, man!” Stephen replied, “Oh, thank you so much, I feel like I’ve done something wrong.” His friend pointed up at him on the dais and said, “F@#k these people. It was FUNNY.”

After that, Antonin Scalia came up to him and said he’d loved the speech. Stephen: “Paisan means partisan, right?” Scalia asked Stephen to do a gesture – sort of a bite of the thumb – and he asked if it was illegal, which it wasn’t, so he did it. And he looked at the ceiling and said, “Please, don’t let me have warm feelings towards Antonin Scalia.”

Solomon asked if it would be more difficult to poke fun at the Democrats, should they win the election in 2008. Stephen said no, because the political landscape would simply shift and they’d adjust to it. It’s been shifting since he started the show. He explained about comedic (and particularly, satiric) status shifts and the status quo, saying that someone with a high status (a rich old man) who is brought down by something (slipping on a banana peel) is funny – but it’s not so funny if a street bum falls on the banana peel. If the rich man slips, and the bum takes his crown and puts it on his head, that’s a shift in the status. The media follows the political shifts, and they follow as a shadow of the media. When the show started in 2005, the Republicans controlled everything, Bush was still riding the wave of approval from the 2004 election, and they were all in lockstep – the Democrats had no status. That has since shifted, especially with the elections in 2006. He’s enjoying mocking Nancy Pelosi, mostly because she made it personal first by telling Senators not to come on his show. But she did ask him to present her award at the Glamour awards recently, and he regaled us with a bit of his introductory speech.

He apologized several times for the dryness – “Nothing is more awful than deconstructing jokes. I’m funny, I promise!” Maybe we weren’t laughing every minute, but it was fascinating anyway, so we’re not complaining.

He acknowledged that the Republicans – and Democrats, to an extent – are making it harder for him and Jon to do their jobs. They’ve become so extreme, such caricatures, that they’re doing his job for him and basically cutting him out. They’re almost too outrageous for him to be able to take that one step further. In 2005, their line was bullsh!t, but it was less obvious. Now, the public sees that bullsh!t more clearly and doesn’t need Stephen as much to point it out.

Stephen’s character, naturally, has the highest status possible. He described creating the set with creator Jim Fenhagen. He wanted everything to radiate out from his head – the star-shaped watermark and the lines on the backdrop, the radial lines on the stage floor. He showed Fenhagen Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and told him that the entire set needed to act as his corona or penumbra.

Solomon: Let’s talk about religion. You are a serious Catholic.
Stephen: (chuckling) I’m a Catholic.
Solomon: You teach Sunday school.
Stephen: I don’t this year, but I have taught 2 of the 4 past years, yes.
Solomon: Do you make jokes?
Stephen: Yes.
Solomon: About what, the Virgin Mary?
Stephen: Not so much. The kids are seven.

They discussed the public discussions of faith, with respect to the presidential race, and Solomon stated that people didn’t discuss religion as much in the 1950′s but Stephen countered with the fact that in 1958, we added ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance. (Editor’s note: it was 1954.)

On confession: he doesn’t go very often because it’s hard. “You have to humble yourself, and I don’t like to do that. And I can never remember the opening prayer.”

Solomon: What did you confess?
Stephen: (audience gasps, shocked) I think you’re missing the point!

Questions from the audience:

One woman asked about his church (she’s a member there) and said that she didn’t see him every week. Stephen: “I’m in Rome. Joey asks about you, and I tell him, ‘She doesn’t care.’”

Another man said that he attends the same church as Bill O’Reilly, which Stephen got a kick out of, and said that O’Reilly leaves right after communion. According to Stephen, there’s an actual acronym for those people: OHACs (Outta Here After Communion). Ha!

One ten-year-old said he was a member of Colbert Nation; Stephen snapped him his WristStrong bracelet. He said he’d dressed up as Colbert for Halloween; Stephen signed his photographs at the edge of the stage. But that wasn’t enough – the kid had a question too. Stephen’s favorite interviews? He named a few we weren’t expecting but can’t remember, as well as Neil Young and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Does Stephen know what the congressmen will say in the Better Know a District interviews? No, he has no idea – but he thought that Congressman Westmoreland would have trouble with the Ten Commandments because he’d interviewed someone else for the same issue and that person hadn’t been able to name them. Could Stephen name them? He thought so, but he wasn’t on the spot for posting them in every courthouse. And he did name them, tripping up on ‘graven images’ and ‘keep the Sabbath holy,’ but the audience helped him out. Not bad!

What comedians make Stephen laugh? “I like Jon. I’m a fan of his, of his work but also because I’ve seen how he runs his ship.” Otherwise, he likes George Carlin, Don Novello, and a few others.

What is Stephen going to do to direct Colbert Nation, and direct the influence he has on people? Stephen can’t say whether or not he has an influence on people; that’s not for him to say, but he doesn’t believe he has much of an impact. “I’m not a very political person. I don’t have an axe to grind.”

Edit: A few more audience questions, with thanks to the good folks over at TWoP:

One boy asked him about how he broke his wrist, and he went through the story again, noting that in the video tape of him falling, you can see him leave the screen horizontally like he was “on an invisible gurney.”

With regards to the BKAD: He’s got three lined up, and even Steny Hoyer said he’d do an interview. Naturally, Nancy Pelosi is the “white whale” – but he corrected himself to say, “the whale in the white ivory pantsuit.” (Editor’s note: Not such a flattering description, but we get the idea!)

One woman noted that he has written Maureen Dowd’s column and appeared at this New York Times function. Because of these two events, isn’t he going to have to put himself On Notice? Stephen laughed and said, “That’s very good. Consider that stolen.”

Another woman had no question, but wanted to give Stephen a word she’d made up for using Oprah’s show as publicity (I believe Barack Obama was mentioned here): Oprahtunity. Stephen asked if it was a gift and thanked her.