Third Beat

Could the rally become reality? There’s now officially some hope the grassroots campaign to hold a “Restore Truthiness” rally in Washington may just happen, based on Tuesday night’s editions of the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

It started when Jon Stewart teased a huge announcement on tonight’s Daily Show – droning on and on about something Earth-shattering that would happen in the future.

Scratch that. Actually, it started days earlier, as Colbert then explained on tonight’s Colbert Report. The viral support of a Colbert Rally to answer Glenn Beck’s Washington event started on Reddit, moved to Facebook, and now has its own site.

He made a big to-do about how as of today, “restoring truthiness” was the #1 search topic on Google. Suck it, “Venus Williams us open outfit” and “Rosh Hashanah”! Which sounds like Miley Cyrus’s Jewish alter-ego, he observed. When a photo manip of a Jewish Miley Cyrus promptly appeared, Colbert improvised a little hello wave to former Executive Producer Allison Silverman, whose hair looks suspiciously like the Photoshop job.

But should he hold the rally? This would require some introspection. He looked for answers from a real live goose dubbed “Geese Witherspoon”, then a bottle of Grey Goose, and then the clip of Jon teasing the announcement.

So after all this, what IS the announcement? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. Colbert promises an announcement to follow, which will be “BYOG” (bring your own goose).

Let’s face it, though – the Report doesn’t start things it can’t finish, and the synergy between the two shows rivals that of the Huckabee/Conan saga during the writer’s strike. You can be sure this is going somewhere… and that somewhere is most likely Washington.

I like Deepak Chopra. I really do. I’ve picked up a few of his books. I followed him on Twitter for a while (until that dark day when he was stuck in an airport with nothing to do but tweet).

But when I sat 20 feet away from him at Wednesday’s taping of the Colbert Report, I wanted to run onto the stage and slap the rhinestone-encrusted glasses right off his face.

Chopra is the latest in a string of recent guests who just doesn’t understand the game of the Colbert Report, and makes the terrible choice to call Stephen out for being a comedian. Chopra’s was the worst example I’ve seen in the history of the show.

If you missed it, Chopra was promoting his book The Shadow Effect, which talks about the dark/embarrassing side we all have. He began to analyze Stephen’s shadow, which started out great – he called him pompous, self-absorbed, etc. Clearly talking about the “Stephen Colbert” character. So far, so good.

But when he presented the idea that everyone’s shadow comes with a gift, it all went wrong. Stephen’s gift, he says, “is to provide comic relief to America.”

Oh shit, no he di’int.

Read the rest of this entry »

Colbert preps for Wednesday (Sports Illustrated)

Next Wednesday night – possibly 2 nights before Conan O’Brien goes off the air – NBC co-executive-douchebag Dick Ebersol will be the guest on the competing Colbert Report.

In the red trunks, Ebersol: head of NBC Sports, known among Saturday Night Live fans as the idiot who ruined the show in the early ’80s, and now known among everyone for calling O’Brien a “failure” and “chicken-hearted” yesterday. (Source.)

In the blue trunks, Colbert: genius, known interview ass-kicker, on the side of comedy, and – despite the lengthy fistfights a few years ago – a presumed member of Team Conan.

I’m salivating already.

For the record, it’s been my policy this week to not shove any regurgitated Conan/Jay info down your throats, and only bring you things you haven’t seen or heard about elsewhere. So I hope nobody is too fed up with it. It’ll be over soon (unfortunately).

To tide you all over while I continue editing my Del Close Marathon photos (why does Lightroom arbitrarily stop creating XMP files halfway through a batch?!?!), take a listen to this fantastic interview with Stephen Colbert on the Sirius radio show Stand Up with Pete Dominick. Pete is the warm-up guy for the Colbert Report, and I always enjoy his crowd work when I go to tapings (I also saw him work a very tired, fed up, and very distracted crowd at a Last Comic Standing taping, and successfully holding onto that group was quite an impressive feat).

Colbert has often talked about the improv-inspired “yes and” theory of life, most famously in his speech at Knox College. It turns out, it’s the same agreement instinct that made him accept the offer to do the show in Iraq for a week (“an improvisor would say yes”).

Right-click and save-as

OR

Listen on Pete’s website

This is the second time he’s appeared on Pete’s radio show, and easily the better of the two (he kept slipping into character the first time around). He hasn’t done a lengthy interview since returning, and you really get a sense of what an impact performing for the troops had on him personally.

So enjoy this, while I spend another evening cursing out Adobe.

LATE NIGHT: IN THE WRITERS ROOM

Moderator: Bill Carter (New York Times)

Panelists: Steve Bodow (Head Writer, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), Tim Carvell (Writer, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), Mike Gibbons (Executive Producer, The George Lopez Late Night Talk Show; Co-Creator/Writer/Executive Producer, Tosh.0), Barry Julien (Head Writer, The Colbert Report), Tom Ruprecht (Writer, Late Show with David Letterman), Meredith Scardino (Writer, The Colbert Report)

This is it! Saturday afternoon, the final panel of the 3-day Just For Laughs Comedy Conference.

There was an awful lot of general information culled from this group. What a typical day is like, how big the writing staffs are, what their professional backgrounds are, etc.

And of course, the requisite acknowledgment that Meredith Scardino was the only female on the panel. Mike Gibbons joked that even having it as good as 1 in 6 was “disproportionate, really.”

The consensus – which I’ve heard often – is that women simply don’t submit to the late-night shows that often. Scardino offered a theory that “men, when they’re standing around joking with each other, make fun of each other, which is a skill that you need [in satire].”

Overall, though, she feels the writers’ room is “an asexual environment.”

The subject of stress and nerves upon joining a writing staff was a big topic of conversation. “When I first got to Colbert, I was pretty scared,” Barry Julien admitted. Tom Ruprecht says it takes a few months for a new Letterman writer to settle in. And Tim Carvell remembered witnessing a co-worker harshly criticizing everyone’s work and thinking “oh man, J.R. hates our boss”. [J.R. Havlan has written for TDS since the beginning, and having had my own material judged by him, I laughed alarmingly loud at this.]

Gibbons shared a jaw-dropping tale of producing Talkshow With Spike Feresten. They would tape two shows on Thursday, one of which would air that Saturday and the other to air 5-6 months later. So they wrote a full season of shows within half a season, with half the episodes being topical and the other half not. Geez.

Does material always translate perfectly into a host’s performance? Can a host make material better? Bodow answered with a tentative yes. “Nobody can make something better all the time,” he said.

Julien was more definitive, saying that he’s seen jokes that aren’t strong on the page, but Stephen frequently makes them significantly better through his performance.

In a conversation about writing for a performer’s specific voice came the quote of the day: “Imagine writing for Leno, who’s a smart guy who aims low,” said Mike Gibbons. [Trust me, huge laugh on this -- perhaps a case of a joke not working on paper as well as it was delivered.]

Another big laugh came when discussing the packets submitted, and Bodow characterized many of the Daily Show submissions he reads as “clinically crazy garbage”.

This is another panel that I would have liked to see delve deeper for the benefit of those who are already familiar with the process at shows like these. Keep in mind, this is an industry conference, not a public event.

There was, though, a fascinating point when moderator Bill Carter (who happened to write the book The Late Shift) grilled Ruprecht on David Letterman’s reputation for being difficult to work for. Ruprecht is no idiot — he kept his comments diplomatic (save for a few we had to collectively pinky-swear would “never leave this country”). But doing the math and reading between the lines painted a very intimidating picture of what it’s like to really write under pressure.

It was during the q&a of this final panel that I finally acted like the journalist I am and asked a question.

A few months ago, the LA times ran a story about freelance joke writers who submit to Leno, Letterman, SNL, etc. These writers are often referred to as “faxers” because – yep – this practice has been around since people actually used fax machines for things other than collecting ads for $299 Mexican cruises. And while it’s against union rules, it’s absolutely common knowledge. It seemed a little silly that this suddenly became an issue worth devoting ink to, complete with a Writers Guild rep promising an investigation.

So what’s the end result going to be? Are freelancers going to go the way of the Dodo due to union rules, or is the idea of a freelancer controversy just a tad contrived? I posed the question to Ruprecht , as he was the only panelist to represent a show that uses freelancers.

He noted that there seemed to be a wrong impression that freelance writers are essentially treated like slave labour. Which didn’t answer my question. He also downplayed the show’s use of non-union non-staff writers, reiterating his earlier point that only 10% of the jokes staffers write make it to air so there isn’t much need for extra material. Which didn’t really answer my question either.

“They should be union jobs,” he said. Which still didn’t answer my question. But that’s ok – I probably shouldn’t have expected one in the first place.

While I absolutely support union writers, I think freelancing is an opportunity that a lot of young writers have benefited from — and technically it’s one of the few high-profile credits a non-American could score if they don’t qualify for entry into the US to become a staffer (which is a whole other story). If any freelancers out there noticing fewer checks coming in from Letterman in the last few months? I’d be interested to hear about it, purely for my own curiosity.

[In writing this recap, I realize how brutal Ruprecht's questioning was. Sorry, brother!]

I should offer the disclaimer that I’m probably the least qualified person to be scribbling down notable quotes during a late night writers’ panel. I’ve sat through a lot of these things (I love ‘em). Plus there’s that minor detail of me taking writing classes from TDS and TCR writers, which were essentially 6 weeks of discussion about each show’s writing processes. Needless to say, I may have mistaken some interesting points for “common knowledge”.

As supplemental reading, I humbly suggest the following reports from yours truly, on recent panels I’ve attended:

Conan writers at the Paley Centre, Nov. 2008:
http://backoftheroom.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/deconstructing-conan-panel-discussion-with-the-writers-of-late-night/

Daily Show writers at the Paley Centre, Nov. 2008:
http://www.theapiary.org/archives/2008/11/the_daily_show_1.html

Political Humor at the New Yorker Festival, Oct. 2008:
http://www.theapiary.org/archives/2008/10/the_new_yorker.html

Stephen Colbert at the New Yorker Festival, Oct. 2008:
http://backoftheroom.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/stephen-colbert-at-the-new-yorker-festival/

(I may at some point even do a little retro-writeup on the 2005 Daily Show panel at Just For Laughs that I went to, as it is woefully underdocumented online).

The Colbert Report is in the midst of taping shows in Iraq – yes, the Iraq – which will air this Monday through Thursday of this week. (Spoiler alert: he got a buzz cut.)

Since the days of Bob Hope, it’s always a huge undertaking for American entertainers to travel – with the help of the USO (http://www.uso.org/whatwedo/entertainment/) – to a war zone. Physically and emotionally, it puts them through more than most of them have ever experienced. While we’re unlikely to get much out-of-character discussion of his experiences out of Colbert, I want to direct you to the words and images of comedians who’ve recently come before him.

…Read more of Punchlines on the Frontlines