Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness

“I love the truth. It’s the facts I’m not a fan of.”

The president looked bewildered. The guests looked confused. The tuxedo-and-corsage crowd at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner expected the president to take a little ribbing, but no one expected
this
. The comedian at the podium looked harmless enough - clean-cut, bespectacled, much like a television anchorman - but had anyone watched his show? Did anyone know what a crazed character he pretended to be? Had anyone warned George W. Bush? The president leaned back in his chair, a look of disgust on his face, and let Stephen Colbert continue.

“Wow, what an honor! The White House Correspondents’ dinner! To sit here at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush! To be this close to the man! I feel like I’m dreaming. Somebody pinch me! You know, I’m a pretty sound sleeper - that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face.” The vice president, who had recently shot a hunting partner by accident, was absent, but the president was not amused. Colbert, standing just ten feet from the most powerful man in the world, adjusted his glasses and pressed on.

“My name is Stephen Colbert, and tonight it is my privilege to celebrate this president. Because we’re not so different, he and I. We both get it. Guys like us, we’re not some braniacs on the Nerd Patrol. We’re not members of the Fact-inista.” Bush’s head bobbed as he chuckled, and Colbert turned to him. “We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Ladies and gentlemen, do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now I know some of you are going to tell me, ‘I looked it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s ‘cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut.”

After a few jokes about believing in America – “I believe it exists; my gut tells me I live there” – Colbert turned to politics. “I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.” Getting his first big laugh, Colbert then aimed for the president’s gut. Bush squirmed.

“Most of all, I believe in this president. Now I know there’s some polls out there saying that this man has a 32 percent 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.”

Laying on the sarcasm, spreading it with vainglorious gestures and pontifical patriotism, Colbert continued for another fifteen minutes. Laughter was sporadic. White House reporters were accustomed to sarcasm, but Colbert took aim at them, too, praising them for soft-peddling issues. Tax cuts? Weapons of mass destruction? Global warming? “We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out.” Many reporters sat with grim faces or downcast looks, their bewilderment suggesting they were witnessing the crash landing of a career, not its takeoff. But within days, Washington and all of America were talking about the comedian who had the guts – or gut - to speak truth to oblivious power. Some of the comments included: “A battle cry from a court jester” (
Seattle Post Intelligencer
); “The man is a genius” (
Philadelphia Inquirer
); “One of the great satirical wits of our time” (
San Antonio Express News
).

Colbert’s “Mocking of the President 2006” aired live only on C-SPAN and MSNBC. Deep in the cable wilderness, it may have attracted a sliver of the prime-time audience, but within days, the twenty-two-minute video became an Internet sensation. More than 2.7 million YouTube hits led C-SPAN to demand that the footage be removed. When the clip was shifted to Google Videos and a new Web site, thankyoustephencolbert.org, the hits kept coming. Released as an audio selection on iTunes, Colbert’s attack instantly topped the download charts. “Stephen Colbert” became the Web’s top search term. Gawker.com asked readers to vote whether the comedian had pulled off “one of the most patriotic acts I’ve witnessed” or was “not really that funny.” Colbert was featured on
60 Minutes
, profiled in magazines and newspapers, and lauded as the man who finally made the truth “painful for President Bush, his cronies, and the media.”

When he stepped before the president, Stephen Colbert was known mostly to cynics and skeptics, a man who would have been unwelcome at the White House. Today, he is the leader of an entire nation. Colbert Nation includes not just the 2 million Comedy Central viewers who watch
The Colbert Report
every night. This singular society, part fan club and part cult, has spread the pompous ego of Colbert’s character around the world and into outer space. Colbert has testified before Congress and twice run for president. He has sung with Paul McCartney, hung his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, and inspired a “Google bombing” campaign that made colbernation.com the first hit for those searching the terms “greatest living American” and “giant brass balls.” Making fun of celebrity culture, Colbert has lobbied his fans to lobby for the placement of his name on just about everything, resulting in “Stephen Colbert” appearing on an airliner, a spider, a Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream flavor, a nesting peregrine falcon, and a piece of the International Space Station.

But what’s most interesting about Stephen Colbert is not who he is but who he isn’t. To begin with, Stephen Colbert is not STEPHEN COLBERT! Off camera, the loudmouthed self-promoter turns into a gentle, polite father of three, a staunch Catholic and Sunday-school teacher, a lover of fantasy, a serious student of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and a major comedic artist whose career has been as finely tuned as his jokes.

So who is this faux-conservative comedian? Who is this man who came from South Carolina, but has no trace of an accent? Who gave up his dream of being a dramatic actor to struggle through the ranks of sketch comedy? Who, as a correspondent for Comedy Central’s
The Daily Show,
deftly parodied the maudlin sincerity of news correspondents? Who, on the first episode of his own show, coined the word truthiness, the zeitgeist term of our times? Who simultaneously embodies and satirizes America’s pompous celebrity culture? Who IS THIS COMEDIAN WHO takes nothing, not even the awesomeness of presidential power, seriously? And why doesn’t he pronounce the “t” in his last name?

The family pronounces the name Colbert with a hard “t.” Even before its youngest member became a celebrity, the name was said with pride. Colbert’s father James climbed his way out of an Irish-Catholic boyhood in the Bronx to attend Columbia University Medical School. An army captain during World War II, he eventually became a leading specialist in epidemiology and the youngest medical school dean in the United States. With a broad forehead and guileless eyes, Dr. Colbert looked a little bit, but not too much, like his famous son.

James Colbert was a model father, deeply involved with his children and his church, and devoted to his wife Lorna. Stephen’s mother grew up in New York’s Westchester County in a well-to-do family. She spent summers in the Adirondacks and the rest of the year in a convent school in Rhode Island. During the Depression, Lorna Tuck met James Colbert at a cotillion. Just twelve but immediately smitten, she kept her crush to herself and waited. James began to notice the young woman with wavy brown hair and a Hollywood smile when she turned fifteen, and they began to date. Lorna dreamed of an acting career but gave it up when, after acting in college, she took sick [WITH WHAT?] [NOTE: I DON’T KNOW AND CAN’T FIND OUT] and was bedridden for a year. Married in 1942, she became a professional mom. The couple had children, and children, and more children - James, Edward, Mary, Billy, Margo, Thomas, Jay,
Elizabeth
, Paul, Peter . . . and, finally, Stephen.

Stephen Colbert is the youngest of eleven children. All were fast-talking, funny, and fun. They made a party out of just being in the same room at the same time. “My brother Billy was the joke teller,” Colbert recalled. “My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.” Colbert has often called his family a “humorocracy where the funniest person in the room is king.” Yet the Colberts were also a highly motivated, intellectual family. Dr. Colbert, Stephen once said, was “a big thinker, a true intellectual. His idea of a good time was to read French philosophy, often French-Christian philosophy.” Few dinners with the Colberts ended without quizzes from their father and theatrics from their mother.

Lorna Colbert, perhaps hoping to pass down her love of theater, encouraged her children to sing and act. “We were the light of her life,” Colbert said. Lorna even taught each child to swoon on command, rolling to the floor. “We all learned how to do the falls,” Colbert said. “And we’d fall all over the house, all the time, and my Mom was fine with it.” Stephen never forgot and was eternally grateful to Lorna for teaching him, despite the family’s tragedies, to “love life without bitterness.” When she died in June 2013, he took a week off from his show to be at her bedside in South Carolina. Finally bidding goodbye, he leaned over and said, “Mom, I’m going back to New York to do the show.” And she said, “I can’t wait to see it. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Weeping, Colbert returned to tell all of Colbert Nation about his remarkable mother. “If you watch this show and you like this show, that’s because of the wonderful people who work here,” he began. “But when you watch the show and you also like me, that’s because of my Mom.” Reviewing her life, he choked up several times, but paid her the ultimate tribute. “She was fun,” he said. Pausing for a few seconds, he added, “It may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was ninety-two does not diminish, it only magnifies the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut.”

Like the stage family Lorna longed to have, the Colberts took to the road regularly. In the years before Stephen was born, the family was uprooted several times following Dr. Colbert as he rose through the medical ranks. From New Haven, Connecticut, where he did his residency at Yale, the family moved to Germany where the army stationed him, then back to New Haven where he advanced to assistant dean of the Yale Medical School. Moving on to St. Louis, a few more Colberts were born while Dr. Colbert chaired the medical school at Washington University. Then, in the early 1960s, with ten children in tow, the family relocated to Bethesda, Maryland, where Dr. Colbert worked for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). While there, the lifelong Republican fell under the sway of a fellow Irishman, John F. Kennedy, for whom he and Lorna voted. A photo of Dr. Colbert shaking hands with President Kennedy soon became an icon in the Colbert house. And on May 13, 1964, while Dr. Colbert was working for the NIH, Stephen was born.

Five years later, the family made one more move to the charming old city of Charleston, South Carolina, where Dr. Colbert became the vice president for academic affairs at the Medical University of South Carolina.

By 1969, the civil rights movement was roiling the South, yet Charleston clung to its past. De facto segregation and a deep economic divide prevailed throughout the city. Confederate flags flew. Elegant antebellum homes were tended by African-American servants. And two Charleston establishments, the military school known as The Citadel and Fort Sumter where the Civil War began, were constant reminders of the city’s conservative, Confederate roots. When the Colbert family arrived, Charleston was bristling with tension over a looming hospital strike that pitted underpaid black workers against the white administration. The strike brought national civil rights leaders to Charleston to denounce the firing of black nurses.

Finally, the tension erupted, resulting in burning buildings and hundreds of arrests. As a medical administrator, Dr. Colbert worked behind the scenes with civil rights leader Andrew Young to settle the strike. Decades later, when Dr. Colbert’s youngest son had become a media sensation, Young went on
The Colbert Report
to discuss the strike. “What your father did was be reasonable and be humble,” Young said. “He had good manners. He was a Southern gentleman from New York. That’s very unusual.”

Keeping a diplomatic distance from troubled Charleston, the Colberts moved into their own elegant home on James Island, just south of the city center. “James Island was like moving to the moon,” Colbert remembered. “It was very sleepy, with dogs sleeping in the street. When I read
To Kill a Mockingbird,
I pictured the town where I grew up. It had dirt roads and some really ramshackle neighborhoods where the black people still lived, essentially in the houses where their ancestors had been slaves. And there were cotton fields and peanut fields and tomato sheds.”

With five children off to college, the Colbert humorocracy was more manageable, but as a Catholic in a Protestant state, Stephen felt out of place. Once when he told a fellow first-grader of his faith, the boy said all Catholics were going to hell. His mother had told him so. Stephen also had health issues, including a tumor on his eardrum requiring surgery, which left him deaf in his right ear. But instead of struggling to fit in, as most kids would have, Stephen remained true to his family heritage.