March 15th, 2010

This is The Colbert Report

This is the rough draft for my Comp 2 assignment, but to save me the trouble of writing basically the same thing again for here I'll just post my paper.

This year during my spring break my friends and I took a road trip to New York City. This wasn�t just any trip to New York, this time we had tickets to The Colbert Report. The Colbert Report is my favorite show on TV and its host, Stephen Colbert, is my biggest hero. On the show he plays a highly conservative political pundit who doesn�t trust facts and plays by his own rules, but out of character he is a very nice and caring father who teaches Sunday school at a local church. I have followed Stephens work since he was on the show Strangers with Candy, where he played a history teacher. After that he was hired on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he was the top correspondent. In 2005 he broke off from the Daily Show and started The Colbert Report where he continues to win awards every year including an Emmy, Grammy, Peabody award, and the coveted Stephen T. Colbert Award for Literary Excellence. He has also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for numerous charities and schools through fund raisers on his show. On March 10th, 2010 I got to chance to see his show live and meet him afterwards.

We were up late the night before and overslept. We had planned on leaving the hotel at noon, but we didn�t end up leaving until 2:30 p.m. After a quick subway ride we arrived at the corner of Central Park and started walking to The Colbert Report studio. We stopped at a local pizza place a block away from the studio. The line already had 17 people in it when we got there at 3:15 and we got our places and ate our lunch. The wall of the building was covered with things people have written and drawn. Some of the things written were �COLBERT FOR PRESIDENT,��Kiss Me Stephen,� and a cartoon of him behind his desk. At 4:30 an intern at the show came around and check every ones ID to make sure they were 18. After a grueling hour and a half we were let into the holding room while Stephen was doing a rehearsal.

The holding room was a lot like airport security. We had to take everything out of our pockets and let a security guard search through it. Then we had to walk through a metal detector and wait in a very small room for the amount of people that were at the show. There was a TV in the corner of the room that was playing all the best moments of the show. Everyone used the bathroom and we watch the TV for an hour as Stephen finished getting ready. Finally, someone from the show came in and told us to cheer as loud as we can before we were let in. We walked into the set and were seated in the third row about ten feet away from his desk. It was unreal seeing it in person. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that it was much smaller than it looks on TV. We waited for about 20 minutes and I had time to look at all of the random items Stephen has on his book case to the sides of his desk. He had all of his awards, a picture of Dr. House, Captain America�s shield, and many other things. A warm up comedian came out and fired up the audience for Stephen. He immediately noticed my friend Andrew�s beard and made a couple jokes about it. He went on for about 30 minutes and then announced that Stephen was ready and walked off to the side of the room.

I want you to want me started playing very loudly and Stephen busted out into the room and ran around the studio clapping every ones hands. After cheering for him for a very long time, everyone quieted down and Stephen asked if we had any questions for him. After about 10 questions he ran behind his desk and it was time to start the show. Stephen did the Table of Contents part of the show, and then the opening sequence played on the TV monitors and we began to cheer and clap. We screamed for what seemed like forever, and then my friends started to chant �Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!� Soon the whole audience was doing it, and then we went back to just cheering and finally we all stopped and the show began.

The show was filmed exactly how it appears on TV. We could see all of the things that pop up on the screen beside Stephen on the monitors around him, but I was too busy watching him the whole time and missed a lot of what was going on, on the screens. I always love when he uses his high tech touch monitor because he always ends up drawing snoopy, and I was very excited when he ran over to it and started a slide show. I was disappointed, however, because the only thing he drew was a big circle around The United States showing were democrats were feeling nervous. It was the first time he had ever used it on the show and not drawn snoopy, but it was very funny how he only used it for a couple of seconds and then ran to his desk and commented that it was 100,000 dollars well spent. Between the segments when it is commercial break Stephen consults with his stage manager about the next segment and his crew sets up the set for him. The Stage manager then goes behind a camera and counts down with his fingers until they are back from commercial break. At three seconds he waved a script in the air signaling the audience to begin cheering. The guest on the show that day was Sean Carroll, an author on a book about the possibilities of time travel. It was a great interview because Sean played along with Stephen�s character, which enabled Stephen to make many jokes and witty comments. Before I Realized it the show was over and Stephen was doing the closing segment. After he was done he walked over to his shelves and picked up a bull horn and started blowing in it like a trumpet. After a while he said �Man, this thing stinks, somebody has to smell this thing.� He then ran up into the crowd and let and audience member take a big whiff of it. Apparently by their reaction it really did smell. He then walked off the set and out of sight. We were then let back through the ho