Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness Read Free Page B

coast of Florida. When Wexler rejected that idea, Colbert asked whether he supported drilling in Alaska.
    WEXLER: “No.”
    COLBERT: “So caribou are more important than my SUV?”
    WEXLER: “No, no. . . .”
    COLBERT: “But that’s what you just said.”
    WEXLER: “What’s most important is that your SUV be required to have better efficiency in the future.”
    COLBERT: “What if I could make it run on caribou meat? Would you be in favor of that?”
    WEXLER: “On caribou meat?”
    COLBERT: “Caribou meat. Or hide, doesn’t matter. Or bone.”
    WEXLER: “Probably not.”
    COLBERT: “Why?”
    WEXLER: “Because we’d have to kill all the caribou to get you to drive your SUV.”
    COLBERT: “So caribou are more important than my SUV.”
    WEXLER: “No, I think we can have both. . . .”
    COLBERT: “So why can’t I kill them and grind them up and put them in my SUV?”
    WEXLER: “Because I think we can have both caribou and SUVS that get better gas mileage.”
    COLBERT: “Let’s move on here. . . .”
    Moving on, Colbert asked the congressman to complete the sentences: “I enjoy cocaine because. . . .” and “I enjoy the company of prostitutes for the following reasons. . . .”
    Politicians and professors, rock stars and renowned experts, Colbert has outdueled them all. His innate intelligence is one reason, but Colbert learned to wing it in the best possible schools – Chicago stages.
    Improvisational comedy, the art of turning a single audience suggestion into a full-fledged skit on the fly, made its American debut in Chicago. In the late 1940s, drama teacher Viola Spolin began giving young actors a series of “theater games” that demanded quickness and a stifling of the internal monitor that keeps most of us quiet. “Shut off the mind,” Spolin taught. “When the rational mind is shut off, we have the possibility of intuition.” The trick to improv, she maintained, is “to get out of the head.” The trick went on stage in 1959 when Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, opened a small nightclub in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. The club was called the Second City, and American comedy has never been the same.
    Before Second City, comedy remained in the shadow of vaudeville and radio. On TV, aging vaudevillians such as George Burns, Bob Hope, and Red Skelton turned up on show after show, and sitcoms like Ozzie and Harriet, Our Miss Brooks, and The Jack Benny Show were nothing more than old radio serials performed before the cameras. Second City changed all that. To its small stage came the wits who would take American comedy into the age of Saturday Night Live . Their names are still legendary in comedic circles - Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, David Steinberg, and Robert Klein. Then came the next generation, some from a Second City spin-off in Toronto - John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, and Martin Short.
    By 1984, when Colbert transferred to Northwestern, Second City’s legacy on Saturday Night Live was widely known. Colbert, however, had little time for comedy. He may have been witty back in South Carolina, but in Chicago he would be – ahem - an actor. In drama classes at Northwestern, he was known not for his humor but his intensity and occasional rage. One professor, frightened by his anger in a scene, suggested he seek therapy. In another instance, Colbert nearly broke an actor’s hand during a rehearsal. “I had a short fuse back then,” he remembers. “I was a real poet-slash-jerk.”
    Northwestern, a Big Ten university on the windy shores of Lake Michigan, subjected the young man from South Carolina to a series of culture shocks. Raised a prim and proper Catholic, Colbert was now living in a co-ed dorm, meeting openly gay students and suffering through long, frigid winters. “Minus 70 wind chill,” he recalled. “Minus 39 regular one night.” Colbert defended himself with attitude, growing a beard, wearing black turtlenecks, replacing his