Hubster maxxamerica has sent us this wonderful “Taping ReporT” of her trip to the December 17th taping of “The Colbert Report”.
I was lucky enough to get a chance to experience a Colbert Christmas at the Report yesterday, and I can’t think of a better way to get in the holiday spirit! It was a wonderful show, full of problems, but the kind that were entertaining and made the experience feel organic and intimate. And the kind that make this a longggg ReporT. I’ve been to some exceptional shows – Hobbit Week and Paul McCartney come to mind – but I think that yesterday’s show was my favorite taping experience to date.
For those who look at these to figure out when to show up (how I discovered this site!): I got to the studio at 4, and ended up #14. They let us into the studio around 5:30, and we were cold but as usual I met some pretty cool and interesting people in line. By five the line was pretty full, so get there between 4 and 5 and you’re good.
This was my second time watching the new Best Of video, which starts with basic training in Iraq and includes Barack Obama ordering Stephen’s head shaved, Joe Biden serving hot dogs to military personnel, the Get Lucky dance video, Wheat Thins sponsorship, the $1,000,000 offer for Donald Trump to let Stephen dip his balls in his mouth, the ColBucket piece with Jay the Intern in Times Square, the segment where Stephen delivers the news while walking slowly around the studio, John Lithgow reading Newt Gingrich’s press release, Tom Hanks Halloween costumes, and the Cheating Death about the pill reminder robot.
Stewart (I’ve finally learned his name!) came out and gave us his prep speech, which is always exactly the same. That “Stephen feeds off your energy”, that we should be really loud and excited because “Stephen eats that shit up!”, that the audience energy helped them win an Emmy this year “instead of losing to the Daily Show for the past seven years”, that Stephen does the whole show himself “unlike the Daily Show!”, and that we have to laugh particularly loud during the Table of Contents because it’ll be awkward if we don’t. He said that we’re going to get a Q&A with Stephen out of character and “please, tell me you know it’s a character!” This particular audience was insanely loud and full of energy.
There was a new warm-up comedian! He forgot to introduce himself so I don’t know who he was. His style is different from Paul Mercurio, he mostly did straight stand up rather than picking on audience members. He was reasonably funny, but I have to say I missed Paul Mercurio’s bit because I liked getting to know the audience. It was a little bit interactive, though, in that he asked if anybody came from far away. There were two women who were both from Sidney, Australia, but they didn’t know each other.
Stephen ran out to I Want You To Want Me, slapping hands of the audience and also his camera crew. The Q&A was pretty short. The first question was what is Stephen’s opinion on Settlers of Catan. He had never heard of Settlers of Catan, but started making things up about it that he liked. He then turned earnest and asked what it was, and the girl explained that it was a game. Stephen said “A video game?” and she said no, a board game, to which he replied “People still play board games?” He asked how you win, and she said “you settle”, which got a lot of laughter from Stephen and everybody else.
The other question that I remember was one woman saying “I know you have friends of a lot of ethnicities” and Stephen interrupted her and said “I have a friend of every ethnicity you can imagine.” She asked if he had a catholic friend, and he said he is his own catholic friend. I think she must have looked disappointed, because he asked her nicely, “Do you want to be my Catholic friend?” She said yes, and he invited her up to the front to stand next to him and have their picture taken. I wonder what they do with the pictures, because at the end of the show the intern who checked us in brought her a release form.
They started playing Fell in Love With a Girl, while Stephen got his hair and makeup touch-ups and petted his hair woman. He flung Wriststrongs and then pretended to throw the dagger (which the audience responded to very enthusiastically, and he laughed and said “you really want it?”). We filmed the intro, and then began the greatest blooper reel taping I’ve ever seen.
Part of the first segment involved Stephen drinking eggnog and saying he wished he could just show us a movie. He talked about Edward Snowden and then about China, and got tripped up on pronouncing “Kim Il Sung”. After the mistake Stephen laughed and put his head down on the desk. Then he joked to the audience that he needed more eggnog, and that nobody will ever know what happened as long as nobody in the audience is on Twitter (he forgot bloggers!) Stephen sipped the eggnog too much laughter from us and then re-taped that part of the segment and moved on.
The bigger problem came from the Tip/Wag joke about how people in China should laugh without inhaling. Let me say this: Stephen seriously commits to his jokes. Because he actually did laugh without inhaling, and apparently for too long, because he messed up another line soon afterward and attributed it to the fact that he was seeing spots. They gave him a minute to recover, he sipped some water and joked to us about being incompetent, which was ridiculous. Overly committed? Maybe. Incompetent? No way.
After another joking sip of eggnog, Stephen re-taped the line about china being run be deranged mad men. Luckily he didn’t have to do the laughing bit again, and it appeared to go smoothly until Mark gave him a signal to stop. Stephen said, “What, was I too good?” Turned out, something got messed up “upstairs” (in the control room, I assume). He then said the line over and over in a bunch of ridiculous accents (just for us!) and they were amazing, my favorite being what I think was Valley Girl. When the cameras were ready Stephen read the line seriously a third time, successfully.
The next mistake was not cut – when we heard the sound of one man clapping (the soundbite of someone screaming and then being shot), Stephen was trying really hard not to laugh at it and took a very long pause. Then he went off prompter (I actually assumed they had stopped taping at this point) and said “Merry Christmas, everybody.” He then returned to the script, and much to my surprise I saw this whole thing air unedited during my flight home. I guess they had enough to deal with in edit.
The Ted Cruz coloring book segment went smoothly. I had seen that book on Amazon last week and got unreasonably excited when I saw that someone at the show had read about it too. What they didn’t mention were some of the Amazon reviews, but they must have read them because one user named Martin D. Johnson wrote “The only crayon color that seems to work with this coloring book is ‘white.’” I think the book’s existence is hilarious and I was so glad to see it talked about on the Report.
Gary Trudeau got a standing ovation when he walked out for his interview. I haven’t actually gotten a chance to watch the interview yet because I was on a plane and that’s when JetBlue chose to air their safety info instead. The part that I most hope did not get cut was when Gary was explaining how to order the show on Amazon and told Stephen to turn on his computer and then get his kids to open an internet browser for him. I also was surprised that Stephen didn’t make a Rick Perry “oops” joke when Gary couldn’t remember the fourth real-life alpha house senator, but I guess maybe they’re friends and Stephen wanted to be nice to him.
It was cool to watch the rapid set change for the musical segment. The platform that the interview table sits on actually folds, so that the table and chairs stay flat but the sides fold upwards and are tied together. The whole thing is on wheels and was carted off to the side of the studio. The change couldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes.
Stephen ducked out of the studio at that point, and came back out in that AMAZING Christmas sweater. He joked to the audience, “It was a gift!” He then introduced Alan Cumming and Cindy Lauper, who hid behind the Christmas tree. We applauded really loud when the segment started, so I missed the intro about Stephen wishing for another Emmy. Then Alan and Cindy revealed themselves, and they sang a slow version of “Let It Snow” while we clapped. Afterwards, Stephen checked his watch and I guess figured out that it took too long, because he asked Alan Cumming if he had time to do it again and Alan said yes. So Cindy hid again and Alan exited, and this time Stephen instructed us not to clap and cheer at the beginning so that the final segment was quiet, “like a Christmas special.” They did the intro and sang Let It Snow again, only this time much faster. It took the audience a little time to get the clapping down at that tempo, and if you listen you can hear how the clapping was overambitious at first. But that was the version they kept.
After the show, Stephen told us to sit tight. He discussed some things with Mark and then told us he had to re-tape one line to be edited into the show later. It was the line about Americans having a lot of Anchorman 2 posters, and he read it in succession three or four times in different intonations, then telling Mark, “One of those will work, right?” I didn’t notice anything wrong with the original version, and it sounded seamless as it aired, so I don’t know what it was about but it must have had to do with sound, because they were unconcerned that Stephen was still wearing the Christmas sweater.
Stephen then explained to us that sometimes he tapes pieces for charities and for the network, but we never see them because he does it before the show. But this time Alan Cumming had to leave early so they couldn’t tape them before, so he was going to do it now in front of us. He warned us that they would be out of context and that one of them he doesn’t even understand. The first one was for a charity, and I feel bad because Stephen explained a little bit about the charity to us but it was something I was completely unfamiliar with and I don’t remember what it was. It had to do with an oil company (maybe Exxon?) and was called “building bridges” or “bridging something”… . I don’t know. He filmed the segment sitting at the desk as if it were part of the show, and the concept was similar to the show in that he did it in character and basically said, “Don’t give this charity money because why would you want to do [the good things that the charity does].” It mostly went over my head but I could tell that it was funny, and I hope someday I see it in context and it makes sense.
On a side note, Stephen was still wearing the Christmas sweater while he taped this. He did unplug the lights, because he said something like “I’m sure it’s bad for me to have this on!” He reached under the sweater to unplug it, but struggled with it. “Is it off?” he asked Mark. When Mark and the audience said yes, Stephen said “I hope that’s what I unplugged.”
The second piece was for Viacom, and Stephen looked at it and said “I haven’t read this one!” We waited a couple of minutes while he read it, and then he tried to explain it to us with the disclaimer that he didn’t really understand what it was about. He did know that it was for some kind of Viacom marketing conference. As it turned out, I actually did understand a lot of it! It was about integrated marketing (which means product placement), and how products that have been mentioned on The Colbert Report have seen boosts in their name recognition. There was a lot of marketing jargon that went over my head too (I remember something about “vertical integration”), but since corporate sponsorship jokes are one of my favorite recurring themes on the Report I thoroughly enjoyed this. He mentioned Wheat Thins, which was great. Note that this was also done in the Christmas sweater, which will be totally out of context at this Viacom marketing conference that I really wish I could go to.
That was it for the show, but even after all that Stephen allowed one more question. Unfortunately, the person he called on asked, “Can I have a job?”. Stephen asked him what he does, and he said he had been a journalist but is now professionally unemployed. Stephen said he could send his resume to the Colbert Report address, and he said somebody would read it.
So that was it, a great taping. All the mistakes only added to the entertainment, and I felt like I learned a lot about how the show is put together. It felt a lot more leisurely and less streamlined than tapings I’ve been to in the past, and I was happy for the behind-the-scenes peek at Stephen’s other jobs: professional philanthropist and marketer of Viacom product placement deals.
December 17th, 2013: The Taping ReporT!
I was lucky enough to get a chance to experience a Colbert Christmas at the Report yesterday, and I can’t think of a better way to get in the holiday spirit! It was a wonderful show, full of problems, but the kind that were entertaining and made the experience feel organic and intimate. And the kind that make this a longggg ReporT. I’ve been to some exceptional shows – Hobbit Week and Paul McCartney come to mind – but I think that yesterday’s show was my favorite taping experience to date.
For those who look at these to figure out when to show up (how I discovered this site!): I got to the studio at 4, and ended up #14. They let us into the studio around 5:30, and we were cold but as usual I met some pretty cool and interesting people in line. By five the line was pretty full, so get there between 4 and 5 and you’re good.
This was my second time watching the new Best Of video, which starts with basic training in Iraq and includes Barack Obama ordering Stephen’s head shaved, Joe Biden serving hot dogs to military personnel, the Get Lucky dance video, Wheat Thins sponsorship, the $1,000,000 offer for Donald Trump to let Stephen dip his balls in his mouth, the ColBucket piece with Jay the Intern in Times Square, the segment where Stephen delivers the news while walking slowly around the studio, John Lithgow reading Newt Gingrich’s press release, Tom Hanks Halloween costumes, and the Cheating Death about the pill reminder robot.
Stewart (I’ve finally learned his name!) came out and gave us his prep speech, which is always exactly the same. That “Stephen feeds off your energy”, that we should be really loud and excited because “Stephen eats that shit up!”, that the audience energy helped them win an Emmy this year “instead of losing to the Daily Show for the past seven years”, that Stephen does the whole show himself “unlike the Daily Show!”, and that we have to laugh particularly loud during the Table of Contents because it’ll be awkward if we don’t. He said that we’re going to get a Q&A with Stephen out of character and “please, tell me you know it’s a character!” This particular audience was insanely loud and full of energy.
There was a new warm-up comedian! He forgot to introduce himself so I don’t know who he was. His style is different from Paul Mercurio, he mostly did straight stand up rather than picking on audience members. He was reasonably funny, but I have to say I missed Paul Mercurio’s bit because I liked getting to know the audience. It was a little bit interactive, though, in that he asked if anybody came from far away. There were two women who were both from Sidney, Australia, but they didn’t know each other.
Stephen ran out to I Want You To Want Me, slapping hands of the audience and also his camera crew. The Q&A was pretty short. The first question was what is Stephen’s opinion on Settlers of Catan. He had never heard of Settlers of Catan, but started making things up about it that he liked. He then turned earnest and asked what it was, and the girl explained that it was a game. Stephen said “A video game?” and she said no, a board game, to which he replied “People still play board games?” He asked how you win, and she said “you settle”, which got a lot of laughter from Stephen and everybody else.
The other question that I remember was one woman saying “I know you have friends of a lot of ethnicities” and Stephen interrupted her and said “I have a friend of every ethnicity you can imagine.” She asked if he had a catholic friend, and he said he is his own catholic friend. I think she must have looked disappointed, because he asked her nicely, “Do you want to be my Catholic friend?” She said yes, and he invited her up to the front to stand next to him and have their picture taken. I wonder what they do with the pictures, because at the end of the show the intern who checked us in brought her a release form.
They started playing Fell in Love With a Girl, while Stephen got his hair and makeup touch-ups and petted his hair woman. He flung Wriststrongs and then pretended to throw the dagger (which the audience responded to very enthusiastically, and he laughed and said “you really want it?”). We filmed the intro, and then began the greatest blooper reel taping I’ve ever seen.
Part of the first segment involved Stephen drinking eggnog and saying he wished he could just show us a movie. He talked about Edward Snowden and then about China, and got tripped up on pronouncing “Kim Il Sung”. After the mistake Stephen laughed and put his head down on the desk. Then he joked to the audience that he needed more eggnog, and that nobody will ever know what happened as long as nobody in the audience is on Twitter (he forgot bloggers!) Stephen sipped the eggnog too much laughter from us and then re-taped that part of the segment and moved on.
The bigger problem came from the Tip/Wag joke about how people in China should laugh without inhaling. Let me say this: Stephen seriously commits to his jokes. Because he actually did laugh without inhaling, and apparently for too long, because he messed up another line soon afterward and attributed it to the fact that he was seeing spots. They gave him a minute to recover, he sipped some water and joked to us about being incompetent, which was ridiculous. Overly committed? Maybe. Incompetent? No way.
After another joking sip of eggnog, Stephen re-taped the line about china being run be deranged mad men. Luckily he didn’t have to do the laughing bit again, and it appeared to go smoothly until Mark gave him a signal to stop. Stephen said, “What, was I too good?” Turned out, something got messed up “upstairs” (in the control room, I assume). He then said the line over and over in a bunch of ridiculous accents (just for us!) and they were amazing, my favorite being what I think was Valley Girl. When the cameras were ready Stephen read the line seriously a third time, successfully.
The next mistake was not cut – when we heard the sound of one man clapping (the soundbite of someone screaming and then being shot), Stephen was trying really hard not to laugh at it and took a very long pause. Then he went off prompter (I actually assumed they had stopped taping at this point) and said “Merry Christmas, everybody.” He then returned to the script, and much to my surprise I saw this whole thing air unedited during my flight home. I guess they had enough to deal with in edit.
The Ted Cruz coloring book segment went smoothly. I had seen that book on Amazon last week and got unreasonably excited when I saw that someone at the show had read about it too. What they didn’t mention were some of the Amazon reviews, but they must have read them because one user named Martin D. Johnson wrote “The only crayon color that seems to work with this coloring book is ‘white.’” I think the book’s existence is hilarious and I was so glad to see it talked about on the Report.
Gary Trudeau got a standing ovation when he walked out for his interview. I haven’t actually gotten a chance to watch the interview yet because I was on a plane and that’s when JetBlue chose to air their safety info instead. The part that I most hope did not get cut was when Gary was explaining how to order the show on Amazon and told Stephen to turn on his computer and then get his kids to open an internet browser for him. I also was surprised that Stephen didn’t make a Rick Perry “oops” joke when Gary couldn’t remember the fourth real-life alpha house senator, but I guess maybe they’re friends and Stephen wanted to be nice to him.
It was cool to watch the rapid set change for the musical segment. The platform that the interview table sits on actually folds, so that the table and chairs stay flat but the sides fold upwards and are tied together. The whole thing is on wheels and was carted off to the side of the studio. The change couldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes.
Stephen ducked out of the studio at that point, and came back out in that AMAZING Christmas sweater. He joked to the audience, “It was a gift!” He then introduced Alan Cumming and Cindy Lauper, who hid behind the Christmas tree. We applauded really loud when the segment started, so I missed the intro about Stephen wishing for another Emmy. Then Alan and Cindy revealed themselves, and they sang a slow version of “Let It Snow” while we clapped. Afterwards, Stephen checked his watch and I guess figured out that it took too long, because he asked Alan Cumming if he had time to do it again and Alan said yes. So Cindy hid again and Alan exited, and this time Stephen instructed us not to clap and cheer at the beginning so that the final segment was quiet, “like a Christmas special.” They did the intro and sang Let It Snow again, only this time much faster. It took the audience a little time to get the clapping down at that tempo, and if you listen you can hear how the clapping was overambitious at first. But that was the version they kept.
After the show, Stephen told us to sit tight. He discussed some things with Mark and then told us he had to re-tape one line to be edited into the show later. It was the line about Americans having a lot of Anchorman 2 posters, and he read it in succession three or four times in different intonations, then telling Mark, “One of those will work, right?” I didn’t notice anything wrong with the original version, and it sounded seamless as it aired, so I don’t know what it was about but it must have had to do with sound, because they were unconcerned that Stephen was still wearing the Christmas sweater.
Stephen then explained to us that sometimes he tapes pieces for charities and for the network, but we never see them because he does it before the show. But this time Alan Cumming had to leave early so they couldn’t tape them before, so he was going to do it now in front of us. He warned us that they would be out of context and that one of them he doesn’t even understand. The first one was for a charity, and I feel bad because Stephen explained a little bit about the charity to us but it was something I was completely unfamiliar with and I don’t remember what it was. It had to do with an oil company (maybe Exxon?) and was called “building bridges” or “bridging something”… . I don’t know. He filmed the segment sitting at the desk as if it were part of the show, and the concept was similar to the show in that he did it in character and basically said, “Don’t give this charity money because why would you want to do [the good things that the charity does].” It mostly went over my head but I could tell that it was funny, and I hope someday I see it in context and it makes sense.
On a side note, Stephen was still wearing the Christmas sweater while he taped this. He did unplug the lights, because he said something like “I’m sure it’s bad for me to have this on!” He reached under the sweater to unplug it, but struggled with it. “Is it off?” he asked Mark. When Mark and the audience said yes, Stephen said “I hope that’s what I unplugged.”
The second piece was for Viacom, and Stephen looked at it and said “I haven’t read this one!” We waited a couple of minutes while he read it, and then he tried to explain it to us with the disclaimer that he didn’t really understand what it was about. He did know that it was for some kind of Viacom marketing conference. As it turned out, I actually did understand a lot of it! It was about integrated marketing (which means product placement), and how products that have been mentioned on The Colbert Report have seen boosts in their name recognition. There was a lot of marketing jargon that went over my head too (I remember something about “vertical integration”), but since corporate sponsorship jokes are one of my favorite recurring themes on the Report I thoroughly enjoyed this. He mentioned Wheat Thins, which was great. Note that this was also done in the Christmas sweater, which will be totally out of context at this Viacom marketing conference that I really wish I could go to.
That was it for the show, but even after all that Stephen allowed one more question. Unfortunately, the person he called on asked, “Can I have a job?”. Stephen asked him what he does, and he said he had been a journalist but is now professionally unemployed. Stephen said he could send his resume to the Colbert Report address, and he said somebody would read it.
So that was it, a great taping. All the mistakes only added to the entertainment, and I felt like I learned a lot about how the show is put together. It felt a lot more leisurely and less streamlined than tapings I’ve been to in the past, and I was happy for the behind-the-scenes peek at Stephen’s other jobs: professional philanthropist and marketer of Viacom product placement deals.