Stephen Colbert has no idea how other news pundits find time to write books. But he felt certain that his character on his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, needed to have another one.
“My character is based on news punditry, the masters of opinion in cable news, and they all have books,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “We don’t have time to write a book and feed and wash ourselves, so something has to go out the window. And [for me] it was family, friends and hygiene for the past year.”
His new book, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t, includes colorful 3-D photographs and explores “a new message within right-wing punditry worth talking about,” Colbert says — the notion that “our greatest days are ahead of us, and we have the greatest history in the history of history, but this instant right now is completely screwed up, and we’ve got to save America from disaster.”
Besides writing the book and doing his show, Colbert has also been busy running his superPAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow — which he created almost by accident, while parodying a Tim Pawlenty political ad.
Colbert has pulled other political stunts — trying to get on the presidential primary ballot in South Carolina, for example. He says he didn’t want to actually influence the election’s outcome, so he had a plan to bail out in case that became a real possibility: He was going to create his own political scandal.
Though his wife wasn’t thrilled with the plan, Colbert says, “I wanted to, like, actually go down to South Carolina and, like, stumble around Columbia, the capital, like pantsless with a bottle of Jack Daniels and try to get arrested.”
Download the Full Interview: NPR.
Stephen Colbert on ‘Fresh Air with Terry Gross’. | Colbert News Hub