'Philadelphia Style' Profiles Meredith Scardino

© Stephen K. Schuster

Late-night television show writer Meredith Scardino may have comedy chops, but even her wit couldn’t save her when it came to composing a speech on chemical and biological warfare for Radnor High School’s Model UN auditions. Yet despite her unsuccessful turn at international relations, this fall Scardino’s alma mater inducted her into the school’s hall of fame, among the likes of actor Thomas F. Wilson (Biff Tannen in Back to the Future) and locally grown war heroes. “It’s kind of absurd,” Scardino muses, with a broad smile. “These people have done actual things.”

Scardino writes a hundred jokes a day as a writer at The Colbert Report, but in between daily deadlines, she and the other writers collaborated on America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t, Colbert’s second book, which hit bookstores in October. “I’m really proud of the book,” Scardino says of her first long-form published work, which the writers penned mostly on their own time. “Then it was put in a big joke smoothie: They just smooshed everybody’s material into one book.”

The two-time Emmy Award–winner (for her work on The Colbert Report) may be modest about her own sense of humor—“she’s written a couple of the funniest jokes in the book,” says her fellow writer Opus Moreschi—but she marvels at Colbert’s unparalleled wit and drive. “He’s brilliant enough that he really just needs clones. The reason why we’re all here is because he physically couldn’t do this on his own. I don’t know where he gets the amount of energy he [has]. He’s firing on all cylinders at all times. It’s terrifying how smart he is.”

Source: Philadelphia Style