Stephen Colbert and his writers pulled the curtain back on their Emmy-winning show during a panel at the New York Comedy Festival Thursday night. One question involved why there were so many white dudes on staff, while another centered on Wheat Thins.
Colbert does sometimes agree with his character.
But he won't tell you when, because that's the great fun of it all. Jokingly, he said he is about 13.4% the same as his character.
"There was a great study by the University of Ohio. They asked two groups of people, who self-identified as conservative and liberal, and an equal number of them liked the show," Colbert relayed. "They asked these people, 'Do you think Stephen Colbert is a liberal or conservative?' And a majority of liberals answered that Stephen Colbert is a liberal pretending to be a conservative, but the conservative answer was that Stephen Colbert is a conservative pretending to be a liberal pretending to be a conservative, and I cannot be happier with that answer," the late night host said. "Because sometimes it’s true, and I really enjoy jumping over that line.”
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Why is there one woman and one person of color on the Colbert Report staff right now?
A number of his writers go way back with Colbert, from his Second City and Strangers With Candy days to the Daily Show era. But when he's considering new hires, he doesn't look at the gender or race of the person who submitted the joke packet.
"I don't know what race the person is when I'm reading the jokes. I'm just trying to see whether it makes me laugh," he said. "I don't know if there are a lot of African-Americans or Hispanic people applying for a job for my show or other shows, and maybe my tastes don't match up or they didn't have a funny packet, or maybe they're not applying. I don't get stats on that. The agencies send us people, or we ask around for people. It would be wonderful to have a diverse writing staff; I'm very lucky to have this staff. They were all so deserving."
Colbert also joked that, while it seems that just about everyone on the staff is white, "Some of us are Jewish, and those people have had no cakewalk."
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times / MCT
The story behind Colbert's Daft Punk joke.
"We knew that Daft Punk wouldn't perform," Colbert said. "At first, when they said they'd come on, they said they wouldn't do a song, and then they said they wouldn't talk to us. And so we had this bit with their manager, and the joke was, since they're wearing helmets, I'd go, 'How do I even know that that's Daft Punk in the helmets? They don't talk and they won't play the song, so how do I know?' And the line we wrote for him was, 'Stephen, if that wasn't Daft Punk, they would be doing the song.'"
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Colbert's evisceration of Wheat Thins won the brand an award at Cannes.
When Wheat Thins paid for a product placement on the show in 2012 — one of four sponsorships that Colbert will allow per year — they ended up getting a nearly seven-minute reaming. Their contract had a gaggle of ridiculous stipulations, like "no more than 16 crackers can be shown at one time" and that Wheat Thins must be called an "inclusive" snack, which the host mocked mercilessly. None of that was a meta setup; the memo was very real.
Nabisco later claimed to have loved the spot that ripped apart their corporate insanity — and the segment won a Golden Lion at Cannes for branded content.
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