If it's a retrospective you want -- favorite segments, notably notable moments (since just about everything Colbert is notable, yes?), world-changers and jaw-dropping silliness and jaw-droppingly silly world-changers-- google will find you lots of those out there (and Colbertnewshub is on the job, as always). Sure, I've got favorite moments (and yes, I have spent maybe a bit too much time watching old clips), but my favorite thing about the Report has always been, well, the meta.
The other kind of meta, not Daily Kos' favorite long-boring-weekend pastime. Here's a quote from Allison Silverman, the show's first co-head writer (via):
One of the tricky things about the show, especially early on, was figuring out what the honest point of view of the show was, and then how to communicate that through the character of Stephen’s contrasting point of view. When you’re working very quickly on complicated stories, that can get hard. It always reminded me of driving in reverse. Usually, we knew our destination, but we had to drive there super-fast and backwards. Every now and then we would be talking about a big story and someone would say, “Wait a minute, I think our point of view is actually the same as the character Stephen’s point of view.” And then we’d be like, “What happens now? Isn’t the audience going to think we mean the opposite of what the character’s saying, when in fact, this time, we’re in agreement with him?” Moments when it's all synchronized were particularly tough things to write and to figure out. I tended to want the audience to be clear on exactly where we stood, but often Stephen would say, “Let them wonder.”
I'm embarrassed to admit that I've got a wingnut brother (the sort that, if he wasn't a jew he'd be an anti-semite), who LOVES Stephen. And not because wingnut-bro's got a healthy sense of self-reflection. But I'm optimistic (or perhaps it's a sanity-preserving delusion) that most viewers get that the Colbert Report was (no, not the past tense!) intended to have meaning on several different levels, (almost) none of which were on the surface. Colbert expects intelligence from his audience.
The best thing for me, especially when I was writing up daily posts about the nightly guests, is that Stephen would talk to people who weren't on every other tv show. Political guests who were ignored by other media (even, sometimes, The Daily Show), political viewpoints that had to fight their way past determined ignorance elsewhere (again, um, TDS), scientific viewpoints that are (ludicrously) political -- and literary guests and techno-geeks and artists and musicians and plain old geeks or whoever. I'm excited to see how he brings that sort of diversity to whatever he turns The Late Show into.
Which leads into my other favorite aspect of the show -- that Stephen Colbert, the real Stephen, seems to live in the same world that I do. Politically, yes, but not just. He's a part of Internet-land, knows the many worlds of the geeks at least as well as the rest of us geeks, but he also knows theater and art and music. If all that my liberal arts education prepared me for was an appreciation of the work of Colbert, well, Dayenu (and yes, wrong holiday).
But this is a political site, so I'll stick to that. I have spent plenty of time this past week watching old show clips (man, those were some otherwise-depressing years) and reading all the paeans and encomiums to the show's greatness being published all over the place, and I've at times gotten a bit worked-up when thinking about our Colbert Report-less future. But I think I've talked myself out of the fear of a Colbert-Report-less world.
Because the thing is, the Stephen Colbert who created all those things we've loved about both the show and his entire public persona, who spoke truth to the power of a President when other such voices were being ignored, who testified in front of Congress about the plight of modern farm workers, who's kept a silent awareness of the values of the Civil Rights movement (and feminism, and progressivism, and labor, and just about every lefty -ism you could think of) right at the forefront of the show -- he's just taking a brief between-platforms break.
But should my fellow Colbert Nation Patriots require a bit of something to get through the show tonight, just listen to the words of the master, again
Edited Friday morning: Changed the title. Because I woke up at 3 am realizing: Requiem! That's the R word I needed!" Sorry.
and again, to change that final video. We'll meet again....
