PLUME: Was there a type of role you personally gravitated towards?
COLBERT: There was a role that I’ve always wanted to do, and that’s to play Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. But that’s the only one I can tell you.
PLUME: Have you?
COLBERT: No, I never have. He’s sort of… I like weak characters.
PLUME: That would explain Strangers with Candy.
COLBERT: Yeah. I do, I like …
PLUME: Characters that resent their ineffectualness?
COLBERT: Probably. Who feel like they should have a better place in the world, but are too weak to assert themselves in any way.
PLUME: And express it through, what, anger and resentment?
COLBERT: Yes. And betrayal. Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons feels like he should have an appointment in court, and his friend Thomas More won’t get it for him. So, he eventually betrays him.
PLUME: That’s a through-line for a lot of characters you’ve played.
COLBERT: Yeah.
PLUME: Conscious, do you think?
COLBERT: Sure. I think there’s something conscious about it. I think in my own life – I play a high status character in my own life, so that’s a quality. I like the revelation in weakness in the high status package. I think everybody’s got weaknesses, and I think if anything was taught to me at Northwestern, it was don’t be afraid to display them. Because people don’t generally like to display them, I think there’s a place for me in performance and being willing to do that. On The Daily Show, I’m essentially a very high status character, but my weakness is that I’m stupid. Like, that’s my character’s weakness. I’ll go into an interview with a guy who runs a Beatles museum, for instance, for The Daily Show, and I’ll confess to him that I don’t know who The Beatles are. Like, I mean, obviously I know who they are, I just don’t know – like, “What was their big hit? I know obviously they had more than one big hit, but what was that big one? The one they always whistled?” I don’t mind seeming like a fool. I truly don’t mind seeming like a fool.
PLUME: But it’s an informed fool.
COLBERT: Well, a fool who has spent a lot of his life playing not the fool.
PLUME: And is able to cover it at least well enough to deal with the subjects that he deals with.
COLBERT: Right.
PLUME: If not in a conversation with someone who would be knowledgeable and able to put up a fight…
COLBERT: No, generally not. But, what happens at The Daily Show, often is that I’ll bring that idea to someone who is knowledgeable enough to put up a fight, and then they call me on it.
PLUME: And then you change the subject.
COLBERT: Exactly. Or I just say, “Of course, of course. I knew that, I knew that.”
PLUME: Or it turns into a personal attack.
COLBERT: Like, last week I interviewed a bio-ethicist at Columbia University, and I kept calling him a bio-ethnicist. And he would correct me, very kindly correct me and say, “No, no, no, it’s a bio-ethicist.”
PLUME: I had spoken a few years ago with Dave Thomas, and we spoke a bit about the great Chicago improv teacher Del Close, and I wanted to ask you what it was like studying under him…
COLBERT: I didn’t do much of it. He’s the first person who taught me improvisation when I was in Chicago, but I didn’t become one of his regular students. What I liked about him is that he was asking you to improvise, without necessarily asking you to be funny. The first thing he wanted you to do was to listen to what the other person was saying and react in some way that was organic to what they were doing. And to just sort of trust that if you were honest about it, you’d come up with something interesting for the audience to watch. I liked that.
PLUME: Was he the fun, raving maniac that many people describe him as?
COLBERT: Not raving maniac so much. He was a pagan, if that helps. But I wouldn’t necessarily call him a maniac. He was actually very calm all the times that I ever saw him. He was no longer doing mind-altering substances or anything like that by the time I came along.
PLUME: Was it another thing that pushed you towards Second City?
COLBERT: No, actually, that kind of pushed me away from it. The little cult, that little group of people that I first started to improvise with were very anti-Second City. They often said that they didn’t really improvise at Second City, and that what we were doing was supposedly real improvisation. We would take a single word and then do a one act play, essentially, based on that one word, for 45 minutes to an hour. And we were all very proud of ourselves and we were really improvising. Then, years later when I actually went to Second City and saw what they did, I didn’t care whether they were really improvising. I wanted to do it. And it turned out that they really were improvising. They just weren’t doing this particular form that I had been taught originally. So, it was in spite of my association with the ImprovOlympia, which is what Del ran.
PLUME: Was that as close as you came to being part of that sort of closed-minded fraternity type atmosphere?
COLBERT: Maybe so. Maybe so.
PLUME: I guess you had to give in eventually.
COLBERT: Yeah, I guess so. But it turned out that Second City was a great place to work, and really all about just freedom and fun.
PLUME: Didn’t you essentially luck into – or were pushed into or guided towards – auditioning for Second City?
COLBERT: I needed a job, desperately. I’d been traveling in Europe, as a lot of young men do, and I came back without a dime. I mean, not a dime in my pocket – this is not, like, an exaggeration. I was sleeping on someone’s floor, and a friend of mine was the box office manager at Second City, and she said, “Come here and I’ll give you a job.” So, I answered the phones, but then I found out you could take classes there for free, if you worked there. I met some really great people. So it was a happy accident in that way, in that I never intended to do it. Once I was there for a while, I realized that this sort of was a place for me. I liked the atmosphere of it, I liked the fact that a lot of people who worked there were sort of damaged – I enjoyed that.
PLUME: What was the appeal of that?
COLBERT: Damaged people are very interesting. The way they behave to cover up their damage is usually very entertaining.
PLUME: In an observational kind of way?
COLBERT: No, no, in a hanging out kind of way.
PLUME: So, they’re not boring people.
COLBERT: No, they’re not.
Continued below…
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