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Sunday, August 23, 2015

Stephen Colbert's Serious Side



Stephen Colbert's Serious Side
Emily Yahr
In two weeks, Stephen Colbert will be on network television every night and he will have to be funny. During his time off between the end of “The Colbert Report” and the beginning of “The Late Show,” he’s been honing his comedic skills, including hosting a public access show in Michigan and showing up in random YouTube videos from a bunker.
But as Colbert hits the press circuit this week with a vengeance, one theme has been emerging: His much more serious side. Presumably, this will not be on display all that much when he takes over “The Late Show” on Sept. 8. But after a decade of playing a character on Comedy Central, Colbert isn’t concerned about sharing the most personal details of his real life — if anything, he seems relieved to finally be himself. Unlike most celebrity interviews that gloss over the tough subjects, his honesty is refreshing, even startling at times.
During both a GQ cover story released this week and a Howard Stern interview, Colbert talked in-depth about the traumatic incident of his childhood, when his father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash. Colbert, the youngest of 11 children, described how he grappled with the traumatic event when he was just 10-years-old — and at the same time, it formed who he would become as a person.
“It’s built into me the way marble is built into a statue. It’s kind of, at a certain age, what I was made of,” Colbert told Stern on Tuesday.
As usual, Stern poked and prodded and asked even more difficult questions, including if Colbert ever listened to the final cockpit recording before the plane crashed. Colbert confirmed that he started looking into the accident a few years ago and, during a Google search, found the transcript — though he could never bring himself to listen to the recording. At the same time, Colbert balked when Stern kept talking about his traumatic experiences.
“There’s a tough event,” he conceded. “But my life has been beautiful.”
Colbert elaborated on this during a lengthy GQ profile written by Joel Lovell; Colbert said that decades later he was able to accept and be grateful about everything he had gone through, summing it up by saying: “I love the thing that I most wish had not happened”:
“Tolkien says…‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”
Colbert also described his thoughts on religion (he’s a practicing Catholic who has taught Sunday school) and how it helped his mother grieve. “The church is flawed — boy, that’s an understatement,” he told Stern. “But it was a beautiful gift to my family and my mother and me.”
Both interviews were fascinating, simply for the fact that Colbert allowed himself to be a real person, as he weaved in comedy between devastating anecdotes. So many stars are so guarded that interviews consist almost exclusively of dull material.
Such unguarded behavior is purely by choice. Did Colbert also have to tell Stern about how he was once medicated when he had an anxiety attack over his career path once he got married? Not at all. But offering humanizing details not only makes for an intriguing interview, it makes a much stronger connection between him and his audience. And given the delight viewers had whenever the notoriously private David Letterman offered any bit of his personal life on TV, it’s a bond that the “Late Show” audience craves.
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