Difference between revisions of "Stephen Colbert"

Revision as of 19:22, January 8, 2010

Stephen Colbert is a writer, a comedian, and an actor. Colbert claims to be Catholic and an erstwhile Sunday school teacher^[1], and a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat. ^[2]

Colbert began his career at Comedy Central in the year 2000 on the show Strangers with Candy. He later left in order to become a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he began to build what would later be the character he would play on The Colbert Report. He was well-regarded on the show, and was occasionally guest-hosting when Stewart had to be elsewhere.

Due to his work on The Daily Show, he won three Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards along with the other writers.^{[3] [4]}

The Colbert Report

In 2005, Colbert left The Daily Show in order to become the host of a spinoff, The Colbert Report.

In the show, Colbert plays a satirical right-wing political talk show host. This personna was largely based on Bill O'Reilly, who has a friendly rivalry with the show.

The Colbert Report has a very loyal following which the Colbert character often uses for his various pranks. For example, in every public vote for naming something, Colbert urges his fans to vote for him.

In his recurring segment "The Word", which is a parody of O'Reilly's "Talking Points", Colbert coined the word "truthiness" in order to refer to the quality possessed by statements which, though factually false, are repeated by supporters who feel in their hearts that they ought to be true, and regard it as quibbling to object to their falsehood.

Colbert has poked fun at Wikipedia and its apparent democratization of truth. He has coined the word "Wikiality" (as opposed to "reality") and caused trouble for Wikipedia by suggesting that his listeners alter articles. In August of 2006, he encouraged users to state that the population of African elephants had tripled in the last decade. Colbert's point was that if enough people believe something, it becomes "the truth". Wikipedia responded by reverting and locking down the pages to prevent further vandalism.

Recently, Colbert had viewers write in his name to a public vote done by NASA to name a new room addition to the International Space Station. Colbert's cult-like followers won the contest for him with an astonishing 230,539 total votes, 40,000 more than NASA's choice of Serenity.

Stephen Colbert recently has gained attention in the media with his satirical mocking of Fox News's Glenn Beck. Colbert has mocked Beck's claims that Barack Hussein Obama is a racist and that Obama is a socialist.

Relationship with Conservapedia

Conservapedia was mentioned on at least two episodes of The Colbert Report. After learning about Conservapedia's initiative to remove "liberal bias" from the Bible, Stephen Colbert urged his followers to insert him into the planned conservative rewrite as a Biblical figure.^[5] This was followed by mass vandalism by Colbert fans.^[6][7] A few months later, Colbert interviewed Conservapedia founder Andy Schlafly.^[8]

See also

• The Daily Show

References