He’s a comedian. An actor. A critical thinker. He’s political. Satirical. And strong willed.
Yes, there are many (sometimes seemingly conflicting) parts that make up Stephen Colbert, but they all culminate into one of the most interesting, intelligent voices calling for people to wake up to the world around them.
Colbert grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, as the youngest child in a family of 13. His parents were devout Roman Catholics, but inspired a critical mind in their children by helping them understand that questioning doctrine did not mean they were no longer Catholic.
Such a focus on intelligence, along with negative perception of Southerners on television, caused Colbert to suppress his native twang in order to speak more like the country’s most prestigious news anchors. This desire to sculpt his ideal personal image remained all the way into university, at which time he decided to pronounce his surname as ‘Col-bear’ instead of the traditional ‘Col-bert’ which his Irish ancestors were known by. “I was flying up to theatre school at Northwestern, and I sat next to an astronaut, actually. And I told him I was going off to a new school. I was transferring to Northwestern and I didn’t know anyone in Chicago. He said, ‘Oh, wow, you could really reinvent yourself out there.’ When the plane took off I was Col-bert, and when the plane landed I was Col-bear,” he told Rolling Stone in a 2006 interview.
The other side of Colbert, the entertainer, was inspired partly by the large size of his family. With 10 other siblings to compete with for attention, it wasn’t an easy task for a youngest sibling to stand out. But they were close, and that’s what mattered. “We’re big fans of us”, he joked in a cover story for TIME.
When Colbert was 10, tragedy struck his family. His father, and two of his brothers, were killed when their plane crashed en route to Chicago. Such loss shattered the family, but Colbert credits his mother’s fortitude in the face of such profound suffering that helped him overcome. She moved the family to a more urban area of the city, where Colbert had trouble making friends. He detached himself from reality, and indulged in fantastic worlds like the Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing, and role-playing games, particularly Dungeons and Dragons.
Later, when he found success, Colbert credited his passion to what he learned from the loss. “You’ve got to learn to love the bomb,” he told GQ. “I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
He struggled through school. Initially dreaming of a career as a marine biologist, this was made impossible when surgery to repair a perforated eardrum caused inner ear damage that left him deaf in his right ear, and stopped him from pursuing a job involving scuba diving.
“Thankfully, dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses.”
Barely making it through high school, it was a while before he decided to enrol at university. He initially studied at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he performed in plays while studying philosophy, before transferring to Northwestern University to study performance.
Though he dabbled in improv, Colbert had the intention to become a dramatic actor. However, when he graduated in 1986, he took a job at improv theatre Second City, answering phones and selling merchandise. As an employee, he was entitled to free classes at the theatre, through which he found a new love for the craft.
It wasn’t long before he was hired as understudy to Steve Carell in the Second City touring company. There, he met future collaborators Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello. Dinello and Colbert were eventually offered the opportunity to produce a sketch show for Comedy Central. Exit 57 ran for only 12 episodes through 1996, but was a strong first outing for the pair, receiving five CableACE Award nominations.
Over the next year, Colbert had stints on various shows, including the short-lived The Dana Carvey Show and Saturday Night Live. In 1997, after performing two comedic correspondent segments for Good Morning America, he was hired on a trial basis to work on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.
It would mark a major milestone in Colbert’s career, even if he didn’t yet realise it. His attention was focused primarily on Strangers with Candy, a parody show conceived by Colbert, Sedaris, and Dinello. Colbert took a reduced role at The Daily Show to star as the ill-informed history teacher, Chuck Noblet. The series ran only thirty episodes, but would later find cult status thanks to its offensive, politically incorrect skewing of the classic ‘after school special’ style.
At the same time Strangers was wrapping up, The Daily Show was increasing in popularity. Jon Stewart had taken over hosting duties, and the political shift the show had made aligned perfectly with the 2000 US presidential election. Colbert took on the role as a correspondent who was “a fool who has spent a lot of his life playing not the fool – one who is able to cover it at least well enough to deal with the subjects that he deals with”. A sizeable hint of truth could be found in his performance, later inspiring the term truthiness to describe his method of delivering the ‘facts’.
“It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.”
Colbert soon found himself a favourite of the fans and his fellow cast members. When Rob Corddry and Ed Helms joined the show, Corddry admits they “just imitated Stephen Colbert for a year or two”.
Dealing with topics ranging from religion to the rights of smokers, Colbert’s wit and enthusiasm for the work saw him win three Emmys for his work as a writer on the show in 2004, 2005, and 2006.
In 2005, he launched his own show, The Colbert Report. A Daily Show spin-off, Colbert performed as a kind of doppelgänger of himself infused with the right-wing pundit he’d been playing for the last five years. He never once breaking character as he delivered a comedic onslaught of fake news stories to the delight of audiences across the world. The Colbert Report soon established itself as one of the highest-rated shows on Comedy Central, and went on to run for 9 years.
A year after the show’s launch, Colbert was invited to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as the featured entertainer. Standing mere metres away from President George W. Bush, he delivered a defining speech that lambasted both president and the media who were dining that night as guests.
“I believe in this president. Now, I know there are some polls out there saying that this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Reception was cold, but the video of the speech was released online to great enthusiasm. The following week, ratings for The Colbert Report spiked 37%, and saw Colbert receive his first appearance on Time’s 100 most influential people list (he made it again in 2012).
That wasn’t Colbert’s only foray into politics during this period. In 2007, he launched a campaign with intent to run in the 2008 presidential election. He initially claimed to be running as both a Republican and Democrat, but dropped the former due to the exorbitant fee associated with running for the party. His campaign received $68,000 in donations, which were used to improve classrooms for low-income students in South Carolina. This was followed by a movement in the lead-up to the Pennsylvania primary that called for viewers to donate to the state’s classrooms in honour of their favourite candidate. $185,000 was donated to public schools as part of the project.
The following month, Colbert dropped out of the running after the Democratic Party refused his application, though his campaign billboards could often be spotted in Marvel’s Spider-Man comics throughout 2008.
In 2010, Colbert was asked to testify before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Security, on the top of migrant worker’s rights. In preparation, he spent a day participating in the United Farm Workers’ Take Our Jobs program. Initially, a committee member called for Colbert to be expelled from the hearing, assuming that he was only there to make light of the situation.
“The media and spectators turned out to see whether Colbert would address the panel seriously as an expert on immigration and make the panel a joke, or stay in character and make the panel a bigger joke.”
Indeed, parts of Colbert’s testimony were humorous, but he dropped out of character in the end to call for better rights for migrant workers.
The question of Colbert’s ability to deliver meaningful points without making a joke of them has often been raised by those he points the finger at. But the man on and off screen are two entirely different people. When he’s not performing, he lives in New Jersey with his wife, Evelyn McGee-Colbert, and two of their three children, sons Peter and John (daughter Madeline is at college).
Fun fact: the treadmill on the International Space Station is named after him, and so are a species of trapdoor spider, diving beetle, and a Chilean stonefly.
Today, Colbert hosts The Late Show, one of America’s longest-standing late night talk shows, following the resignation of David Letterman in 2015. The truthiness that inspires his insightful humour has crafted a foundation on which the new age of comedy has been built, and with such a prestigious show in his hands, Colbert is sure to delight and educate with tongue-in-cheek for a long time to come.