It has been a long Monday, and it’s nearly 9 p.m. Colbert is still wearing pancake makeup and a red power tie as he dismisses Scardino and Levin, shuts the door, sits down, and smiles. That’s when the man behind the caricature emerges. It turns out that the real Stephen Colbert is a mensch. He just doesn’t want his employees around while he gushes about them. “I don’t know what they do to people at Cornell. I don’t know what they inject them with. Maybe it’s in the gorge water,” he says. “But both Meredith and Liz have this unbelievable energy, always ready with an idea.”
Colbert continues in this vein for several minutes and then, the interview over, he opens the door and spots the two women standing nearby. Narrowing his eyes, he wags a finger at them in an attempt at intimidation. “I’ll see the two of you early tomorrow morning.”
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Colbert has a background in improvisational comedy, and the writing room reflects that collaborative sensibility. “I don’t care whose idea it is, mine or somebody else’s,” he says. “I just want it to be as funny as it can be.”
Writing for Colbert’s distinctive voice, says Scardino, is “liberating because you’re already starting from such a funny point.” She adds, “Stephen is like a hurricane of skills. He can sing. He can dance. He can cry on command. You can write anything for him, and you know he’d do a way better job than you can imagine. I’m sure if I wrote something that had him fly fishing while tap dancing, he’d be an expert at it.”
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One of Scardino’s occasional assignments is to prepare questions for Colbert to ask during his nightly interview segment, the guests ranging from Nicholas Kristof to Kris Kristofferson. After perusing a guest’s book or biography (“You get smarter—at least dinner party smarter,” she says), it is simply a matter of crafting queries worthy of Colbert’s obnoxious alter-ego. So when journalism professor Dan Sinker, the man behind a phony and fantastical Rahm Emanuel Twitter account, was a guest on the show, Scardino wrote this question for Colbert: “Why did you start this fake Twitter feed? Is academia that bone-crushingly boring?” And when Steve Martin appeared on an earlier show, Scardino made use of her painting major, putting the noted art collector’s knowledge to the test. For instance, Colbert asked Martin to determine which of two choices was actually Ellsworth Kelly’s “Green” and which was a Sherwin-Williams paint swatch.
But Scardino also gravitates toward what she calls “the borderline incredibly dumb things.” Last November, she felt it was time for Colbert—”by the power invested in me by basic cable”—to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey for all crimes past, present, and future. Naturally, later in the show, the turkey (named Joseph Gobbles) went on the lam after shooting an intern in a drug deal gone bad.
Full Article: Cornell Alumni Magazine.
