The hardest thing for Stephen Colbert, as he prepares to take over “The Late Show” on CBS Sept. 8, is waiting to get on.
“This is the longest I’ve gone since I was 24 not performing in front of a live audience,” he told reporters in an expansive Q &A culminating CBS’ day at the TV Critics Association summer press tour, “and I am twitching.”
But by now, he says, “I’ve had too much time in the simulator. I need to get in the jet.”
So he’s released some things online — a backstage look at his progress for the CBS show, an extensive takeover of a Michigan public access channel, a quick reaction to huge political target. And for critics spending their 14th day in a Beverly Hills hotel for the press tour, a hilarious little film that promoted the late night show as if it were Cialis.
He called the bits he’s done since he bid farewell to “The Colbert Report” Dec. 18, “exercises for us to if we saw something funny we wanted to do.”
They wanted to keep up their ability to turn them around quickly too. “Like, Donald Trump announces that he’s running for president at 1 o’clock, I want a script done by 3:00. I want to shoot it and give it to CBS to post by 5:00 because that’s the speed at which you have to do it.
“But, on a baseline, I want our audience to know we hadn’t forgotten about them, because, for me, the other character you are playing because when you are regardless of whether you are playing a ‘character,’ you are in a relationship, a scene with the people behind the lens and the people in the room, and I want them to know I hadn’t forgotten that we have a scene partnership together, and I wanted to give them something as the summer went on.”
In addition, he did a podcast, whose intent, he says, “was to answer the question ‘Who is Stephen Colbert?’ It’s just me, 20 minutes every week, talking with my friends about the way we do the show.
“The guy you hear there is me not performing. That’s just me hanging out. So it also scratched an itch. I learned how to do everything I know how to do by performing. I didn’t become a writer by I became a writer because I was the only one who would write for me, you know. I became a director because I was the one who would cast me, and so I had to keep doing it because I would go crazy.”
Still, he says, that hasn’t been enough. “At this point, I’m anxious to get on the air. I don’t like comedy in theory. That’s just theology. I want to get to the religion. I want to get in front of the audience and hear the laughter, you know. The emotion I have right now is not anxiety over doing the show. It’s anxiety about the eagerness to get on stage.”
Yet the question about “Who is Stephen Colbert?” may be real, for those who hadn’t seen much of him outside of his bafoonish character on “The Colbert Report.”
But he says it’s easy to see him in the old show — particularly when he laughed at guests’ jokes quite sincerely. That guy who can’t stop laughing, that’s the real Stephen Colbert,” he says. “I can’t wait for him to be the only guy you see.”
And though he wouldn’t say what exactly his “Late Show” format would be, it’s clear that the interviews most interest him — as it did on the old show. “When you’re interviewing people, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. “That was, in some ways, the most energetic, the most exciting part of the show, to me. And now I don’t have to hold back at all. I had to put everything through, like, an occipital CPU up here,” he says, pointing to his brain, “to live render what my character would think about what the person just said, but still have my intention behind it. Now I can just talk.”
“Not having to run everything I say through the character’s bible in my head is really lovely,” Colbert says. “I used to finish my other interviews whenever I’d go out into the field, whether it was to Washington or talk to lobbyists or something like that, I’d be exhausted at the end of every interview from having gone through his little path, his little maze in my head before I could say anything, and trying to do it fast enough that the audience couldn’t tell I was doing it. Just doing it as myself was hard the first time I did it, but every time after that, I’m not tired at the end. That’s really heartening, especially since I’m going from 80 hours a year to 200 hours a year, but who’s counting?”
Colbert says his blustery old character was able to be “extremely intimate with the audience because I had the excuse that I didn’t mean it. But I’m here to tell you I meant a lot of it. I even agreed with my character sometimes.
“My hope is that when you see me on the new show, you’ll go, ‘Oh, wow. A lot of that was him the whole time.’ But I won’t know how much of it is until I go do it, honest to God. It’s an act of discovery for me, too. All I know is it’s the same creative team. So I’m just as excited about the jokes.”
“You will recognize our sense of humor,” he promised, “because my entire creative staff came with me, and that’s wonderful for me.”
As such, news will continue to be a part of the show “we are probably going to do that more than other people just because it’s combed into our DNA after the last ten years.
“That’s one of the reasons why I’m really happy that we are starting on Sept. 8 because the day after Labor Day, back before things became insane, was traditionally the start of the presidential campaign,” Colbert says. “Now, I’m just hoping that certain people stay in the race until Sept. 8. I’m not going to name any names. But let’s just say, I want to do jokes on Donald Trump so badly, and I have no venue. So, right now, I’m just dry-Trumping.”
(It was a good enough line to make him live-tweet it on stage, hashtag: dryTrumping).
As he spoke, work continued on the Ed Sullivan Theatre, where his staff moved in just last week, after extensive theater renovations. At a CBS party later that night, he’d show reporters the look of the new marquee he had as his phone screensaver. “But it’s been a 2 1/2 month process so far. The theater has been completely gutted. You’ll probably recognize the stonework on the proscenium that used to be behind Dave on the left, but it’s been taken back to its 1927 beautiful state.
“Right now, we’re building the ‘Late Show’ set within the context of a Broadway theater, which you didn’t have before. The technology has advanced enough since 1993 that we don’t actually need giant sound sails and sound baffles,” he says. Previously, “you couldn’t tell that it was a theater, but now you can. I find it a very intimate space now because we are sort of acknowledging that we’re in a theater together.”
In the last days of Letterman’s show there, Colbert went up to pick his brain.
“I asked him questions about a half an hour, and at one point I said, ‘Do you mind me asking you these questions?’ And he said, ‘I don’t mind at all. No one’s ever asked me these questions.’ I said, ‘Really? No one’s ever asked you these questions?’ And he goes, ‘Who would know to ask, and who would care what the answer was?’ And that that felt great. That was a very gracious way for him to say, ‘Only the person sitting behind that chair cares about the conversation we’re having right now.’
“It was great. We talked for an hour about how he approached every day of production and what the relationship with the audience was. Literally, like, ‘Where do you put the producers? The desk?’ — all these various decisions.”
In fact, Colbert says he asked what things he would have changed in his show. “He goes, “Uh, I would have liked to have tried the desk on the other side.” So I went to work the next day, and I called my designer. I said, ‘I have terrible news. We’re going to reverse the set’ because I want to try that too.”
Looking things at a different angle has always been Colbert’s method of operation, though. And he spoke about the way he carried his old character in terms he used at the old Second City:
“We used to say ‘Wear your character as lightly as a cap, so, as you improvise, you can adjust.’ It was an act of discipline. It was an act of discipline as the years went on to keep that cap on, because the show was actually just a ton of fun for me to be out there with the guests and doing the material.”
That meant “when I spoke to Cardinal Dolan or I would speak to a Medal of Honor winner, I would just dial it up and down as need be,” Colbert says. “I’m very interested in my guests, and I’m looking forward to being able to be sincerely interested in what they have to say without regard to having to translate it through an idiot’s mouth. So if that leads to some serious conversations, I’d be very happy.”
But he had no interest in firing up any trumped up competition against his colleagues Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. “The idea of war between hosts makes no sense to me,” he says. “It’s not like my success takes away from anybody else, and fighting amongst each other doesn’t sound funny. There’s no joke there, so I’m not interested.”
He is, however, interested in getting on quickly so he can capitalize on the wealth of material this summer.
“Every little boy grows up believing that they could be President of the United States,” he says, “and I’m so happy that that little boy is Donald Trump. I just hope he’s taking his vitamins…
“Every night before I go to bed, I light a candle and pray that he stays in the race,” Colbert says. “And I also pray that no one puts that candle anywhere near his hair.”