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The Funniest Person in the Room
As the youngest of 11 children in South Carolina, Stephen Colbert regularly competed for laughs in what he calls a family humorocracy. "The funniest person in the room was king," he says. This would explain his agile storytelling and lightning-quick comebacks. It might also tell us something about his quest for world domination.For four nights a week on Comedy Central, The Colbert Report satirizes a politically conservative talk show in the vein of, say, The O'Reilly Factor; Bill O'Reilly himself has given a nod to the spoof by appearing as Colbert's special guest. To clear up any confusion about how much of Colbert's act is sincere, he says, "I have my character, who is named after me, and he's a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot.
I don't think that's so different from me, but it's an amplification of my own weaknesses." Colbert, who started out as Jon Stewart's sidekick on The Daily Show, got his own show three years ago. He scored major points when he received both cheers and jeers for a scandalous monologue he aimed at President Bush during the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association dinner. He then launched an assault on the English language and was rewarded with Word of the Year -- truthiness -- by Merriam-Webster. He published the book I Am America (And So Can You!) , and he kicked off his own presidential campaign, with Doritos as his major sponsor; night after night, he contentedly crunched the chips, on the air, behind his desk. (He ended the campaign when he'd made his point -- that he will go to almost any length to pull a prank -- and wound up with his mug on display in the National Portrait Gallery.) And though he's no longer running, he still addresses his viewers as People and Nation. He makes a victory run in front of the audience every night, arms outspread, that effectively upstages the featured guest, waiting to be interviewed at the other end of the set. (Last year, during the audience warm-up, Colbert ran too enthusiastically around his desk and broke his wrist.)
Asked to name the apex of his career so far, he says, "I very much enjoyed trying to get a bridge named after me in Hungary and meeting the Hungarian ambassador."
Reader's Digest visited Colbert in his warren of offices in midtown Manhattan. For a would-be dictator, he is disarmingly sweet and unguarded. He carefully opens up a beautifully bound book to show off photos of a boat he built out of Spanish cedar and mahogany with his nine-year-old son, Peter, last summer. And unlike the character Stephen Colbert, he keeps his political views to himself.
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