Klassic Kolbert: ‘The Al Franken Show’, featuring Stephen Colbert

Huzzah! The interminable 2008 Senate election in Minnesota has finally been decided, and we’ll soon be able to address Al Franken as Senator Al Franken. In honor of the occasion, I’m going to repost an old interview with Stephen Colbert from The Al Franken Show, co-hosted by Katherine Lanpher (we originally posted it here). I apologize again for the quality of the audio, but it should still be accessible here. The interview was originally posted by moveleft (a site that is no longer being maintained), and I loosely transcribed a portion below:

KL: … He’s joining us here in the studio; welcome to “The Al Franken Show”.
Stephen: Thank you for having me. First of all, I want to, ah, I want to agree with Al. [KL laughter] And I want to praise his metaphor, uh, for clogging the – the toilet that journalism’s going down. I’ve used the metaphor myself. Probably not first. I was probably copying you.
AF: No, I was – I must have, subconsciously, copied you.
Stephen: I like to think “The Daily Show” takes the information from the day, and we digest it, we pre-digest it, for the audience … and then we pinch out a turd of truth for the audience. We polish it, [Franken: Mmm-hmmm] and then we present it for the audience.
AF: “Turd-polishing” is a comedy writer term.
Stephen: Right. It is.
AF: Hey, are you ever, um … I remember I used to do, in the old days, “Saturday Night Live,” like, this thing called …
Stephen: Mmm-hmm.
AF: … this thing called “Point-Counterpoint,” on “Update”.
Stephen: Yeah, I remember it.
AF: And I realized that what I was doing was what they were doing on “60 Minutes,” which was a “Point-Counterpoint” kind of thing …
Stephen: Right.
AF: … and then, and, but, adding jokes to it. Do you – do you ever, does it ever amaze you that basically what you do is exactly what they do, except with a “value added”? In other words, there are people who have your job except that they don’t add …
Stephen: … Put quite as much thought into it?
AF: [Laughing] Do you know what I mean?
Stephen: Yeah, I do! I do. I mean, I – I actually, I really … I like the news … I don’t know what to do without it, and there are journalists that I like. But I do sometimes think, oh, how much easier would this be if I was *just* reporting the news? [KL laughter] Because … I – trying to think of a joke about – and also getting the, enough information out to inform the audience enough so they would *get* my joke? Is doing the news job as it is. People say, like, they get their news from “The Daily Show,” it’s only incidental that we do that; we don’t really want to change the world through mime. We just – we’re making jokes. But to do so, we have to tell them the news so the broadest possible audience understands our joke. But we’re kind of doing a news job already, so I – I often think, ah, if I was *just* stopping here in this thing I’m writing! Like the thing I was writing today, if I was just stopping here …
AF: What are you writing today?
Stephen: Well, today it was about the Oscars. About how it’s over for the white actor. [KL and AF laughing] There’s just nothing; there’s really, there’s really nothing left for them. I mean, I think we’re heralding the end of the white actor as we knew him. I mean, a lot of those parts that we saw today, there was a time in Hollywood when those would have been played by –
AF: Morgan Freeman.
Stephen: … by white actors. I mean in the 1920s, those could have been white guys playing …
AF: Anthony Quinn would have played …
Stephen: … Morgan Freeman’s part; exactly.
AF: You know, Morgan Freeman, what a great actor.
Stephen: He’s great, but – but [adopting "Stephen Colbert" voice] seriously, Al. A Black guy playing a Black guy? Where’s the stretch, there? A white guy playing that part would have been … that’s acting. Making that believable?
AF: I take your point. Do you … [the] thing about Morgan Freeman … I wrote this line in a book once, is that no one respects a slave unless he’s *played* by Morgan Freeman. [Beat] Anyway.
Stephen: Or that guy from Amistad. But he was hot.
AF: I wanna play something you did; which was your take on the Gannon-Guckert story. Let’s play a little bit of that …
[Full clip here, courtesy of Comedy Central's MotherLoad]
AF: Okay, now … [KL laughing] Why do you think – we were discussing this before we got on – I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to leave it in the locker room; that’s what we call it.
Stephen: That’s another comedy term.
AF: Yeah. Don’t leave it in the locker room. Okay … but – but let’s talk about this. This is a – a huge story to me, which is that -. And if the Clinton administration had done it, there would be a couple of, there would be a House investigation of it, a Senate investigation of it. Why do you suppose that this Guckert-Gannon thing, and, and every one of our listeners probably knows, this is about the former male prostitute who really wasn’t a reporter, who got a White House press pass before he actually was on “Talon News”, right?
Stephen: I … I don’t know; I know that he was turned down by the congressional press office.
AF: Right.
Stephen: And normally, you have to get that before you get a White House press office pass. But he got it, anyway.
AF: So why do you suppose that this isn’t enormous? I mean … they’ve been paying guys like Armstrong Williams, like Maggie Gallagher, now this. Why isn’t this a bigger story?
Stephen: I can think of two reasons. One is, I think … somehow, you know, uh, uh … Who, who was it who said, the greatest trick the Devil ever played on man was convincing him that he didn’t exist? [Editor's note: Keyser Soze?] Um, and in the same way, one of the greatest tricks that the – the Right, or the Bush administration, has played on – ah, really, just the Right has played on – the American public is that journalism doesn’t exist. And the idea that, “Uh, listen, people ask questions, that’s ‘journalism’!” It’s like saying ‘Fox News’. “Well, we’re ‘news’ … We’ve got graphics, we’ve got people in front of desks, and, um, look at the teeth on this woman! She’s clearly an anchor!” [AF laughing] You know? … As if the form – as if the *form*, itself, is the thing. And that’s, that’s driven a lot, obviously, by TV. You know? Because it’s all form. Um, and so the fact that somebody turns out to not have any credentials or have an odd background; well, does that really make him not a legitimate reporter in most people’s eyes? I don’t know whether it does. Because reporting itself, or the idea of journalism itself, which is in itself a liberal effect because it investigates power, at its best. And that kind of iconoclastic, status quo attacking, um, is … it’s a liberal virtue; it’s not a conservative virtue. So, the basic virtue of journalism has to be called into question by the Right and, therefore, *all* of journalism has to be called into question by the Right, so the fact that someone turns out to be false doesn’t mean anything because they’ve asked us to not think that journalism has any objective standards. Which would be applied to the Right’s journalists, the Fox people, if you held to them. So, by demeaning journalism altogether, you keep someone from – Gannon – from really being a big scandal. Have, have I made myself obscure?
AF: Yea – no, you’ve made yourself clearer, because … the thing with Fox is, they now have a slogan; do you remember “Fair and Balanced”?
Stephen: I do. I do remember that.
AF: Okay, that they’ve kept. But, but they precede it now with, “Real Journalism”. [Laughing]
Stephen: That’s nice.
AF: Which is like a restaurant saying, “Real gourmet food”. [AF and Stephen laughing] And it is, it is a sort of a diminishment of what journalism is, where they go, like, “We’re fair and balanced. Uh, okay, we’re not really; you know, we’re a ‘balance’ to the left wing. So we’re really – we’re right wing. Yeah. But we’re fair and balanced and … whatever you want. Listen, we’re just sayin’ it, okay? [Stephen: Mmm hmm.] Wink wink.” And it does sort, uh, of say, okay, journalism -. That’s an interesting analysis, which is …
Stephen: ‘Journalism’ doesn’t mean much any more.
AF: Yeah.
Stephen: ‘Cause people like Armstrong Williams are saying, “Hey, I run a company also! [AF laughing] The money was for the company, not for the journalism!”
AF: Yeah. We’re gonna come back with Stephen Colbert, who’s a senior correspondent for – at Comedy Central’s fake news program, “The Daily Show” …

Congratulations, Al!