Five Minutes with Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's The Daily Show
by Elana Berkowitz and Amy Schiller, CampusProgress.org

As one of America’s finest voices in fake news reporting, Stephen Colbert’s straight guy blue suit, arched eyebrows and deadpan seriousness have become highlights of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” where he is the senior correspondent. As cable news increasingly becomes a sad parody of itself, “The Daily Show,” an actual parody show, remains profoundly funny and totally relevant.

CP:  When you were developing your super straight guy look and sound, which actual media personalities did you model yourself after?

SC:  ... [In] terms of who I channel, my natural inclination was Stone Phillips, who has the greatest neck in journalism. And he’s got the most amazingly severe head tilt at the end of tragic statements, like “there were no…survivors.” He just tilts his head a bit on that “survivors” as if to say “It’s true. It’s sad. There were none.”  ...And then I also used Geraldo Rivera, because he’s got this great sense of mission. He just thinks he’s gonna change the world with this report. He’s got that early seventies hip trench coat “busting this thing wide open” look going on.  So those two guys.

CP: You do “This Week in God.” Which is one of our favorite segments. You’re from a South Carolinian religious family and you are a church-goer yourself. Why did you choose to focus so heavily on religion right now?

SC: We used to do This Week in God only once a month, but if there was room on the show we could do it every week! There is so much religion in public life. It has become acceptable for court decisions to be based on the Gospel. There’s so much religion in public life, it’s a religious pandemic. It’s everywhere. It’s not a needle in a haystack. We throw away stories every week. I know we’re not a secular state like France which has it in their constitution, but boy I wish our founding fathers had been at little clearer in that First Amendment.

CP: How do you keep finding people to interview on “The Daily Show” who either don’t know the interview is satirical or are willing to play along?

SC: Everyone knows what the show is at this point, but they don’t understand where we’re going with the conversation. I talk to them for hours and you’re seeing the 3-4 questions that are important to my segment. They don’t necessarily perceive a 3 minute edit out of a 3 hour conversation. I don’t make a big deal out of being funny, and then we do our best to bring ‘em back alive in editing.

(Click here to read the complete article.)