The Bay Area Reporter Online is reporting that Representative Jared Polis (D- Colorado) may soon be featured in a Better Know A District segment of ‘The Colbert Report’. The freshman congressman is the first openly gay non-incumbent elected to Congress.
Those wishing to see Polis may have the chance to catch his comedic side on an upcoming episode of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. The show’s host, Stephen Colbert, has a recurring segment called “Better Know a District,” where he skewers Congress people with nonsensical questions.
In 2005, Colbert’s second segment in the 435-part series featured a memorable interview with openly gay Congressman Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), who was asked if his weight bothered his wife. Frank looked visibly perturbed throughout the mock interview.
Asked if he was willing to undergo the same treatment, Polis told the Bay Area Reporter last week that his sit down with Colbert would be “coming to you soon.”
Is this enough reason to post that memorable second installment of BKAD featuring an openly left-handed Congressman? I think so!
October 27, 2005: Better Know a District – Massachusetts’ 4th – Barney Frank
Stephen sits down with Congressman Barney Frank to discus life as part of a highly discriminated minority group: lefties.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Better Know a District – Massachusetts’ 4th – Barney Frank | ||||
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Episode 5090 (7/1/2009)
By · Comments
EPISODE NUMBER: 5090 (July 1, 2009)
GUEST: Nicholas Kristof
SEGMENTS: Tip of the Hat/Wag of the Finger; Judge, Jury and Executioner
VIDEOS: Wenesday, July 1, 2009
This week’s shows have been so solid! Tonight’s show was chuck full of some amazing satire. Loved Stephen’s bringing up of “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot“. I remember reading that book when it came out and howling at the idiocy that is Rush. And how hilarious was the Big Book of Republican Prophecies? THE GIPTURE FTW!! There was so much idiocy pointed out during Tip/Wag that it was mind-blowing. The Clinton Curse was a fantastic piece pointing out the amazing hypocrisy of so many of the Republican party who have fallen. And Stephen screaming like a girl is never not funny.
I don’t care how many times I see it, the “Judge” in the Judge, Jury and Executioner opener is never not sizzling hot. But man, those court cases were just horrible! And speaking of mind-blowing, how terrifying was the Nicholas Kristof interview? I mean, we all know that there are all kinds of chemicals in food and water that are slowly making us sick, but it’s always scary to hear them outlined so clearly. The New York Times article by Kristof is really interesting – go read it if you have a chance.
So what bit of satire whet your whistle the most tonight?
- From now on, Minnesota is the land of 10,001 lakes, because I made one last night out of my tears.
- Plus, we all remember how the Iranian president insulted him with his book, “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Zionist”.
- As everybody knows, the Chinese character for Al Franken is also the character for opportunity. And strangely, Liquor pig. It’s a fascinating language.
- The Gip-ture!
- These kids don’t need a handout, they need a pep talk. It’s like Jesus said in Matthew, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was hungry and you said ‘Get a job’.”
- Look, I get it, when someone misbehaves, it’s natural to assume he’s a Democrat, even when he’s the head of the Republican Governor’s Association.
- Bill Clinton! Sanford is just the latest victim of what some are calling the Clinton Curse.
- I’ve looked at an actual test online, and I’ll tell you, before I let someone put out the raging fire in my house, I want to make sure they know which one of these words is spelled correctly.
- For too long, we have been silent about the trampling of our rights merely because no one was trampling our rights.
- Caged at last, caged at last, thank God almighty, I am caged at last!
- So the essential facts are “Gold! Gold! Gold, I tell you!”
- So it is no longer a toxic lake, it is a toxic kiddie pool.
- Our children are already being endangered by everything from sexting to sex-maphore. Jimmy, that’s disgusting, blur it.
- You saying something’s happening to fish junk? That’s a technical term.
- This is the latest study, this didn’t happen to people born 45 years ago, right?
- Penis deformation? I don’t like those two words together.
- This is a real threat to something I care about, which is the balls.
- Can we blame women for this?
- But Nick, I need my plastic soft. I need my water bottle to go [thkunk thkunk].
- I think you’re burying the lead here, Nick, because what I’m hearing is that I’m drinking lady pee. Can congress pass a law to make them hold it?
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Klassic Kolbert: Daily Show Edition – Patriotism
By · CommentsHello all! With the Fourth of July coming up this Saturday, I thought I would do a patriotic Klassic Kolbert for this week. In this video, we find ultra-patriot Stephen Colbert looking down on lesser patriots such as veterans and the Smithsonian in his longstanding segment America: Love it or Shove it.
American Flag – Stephen Colbert is appalled by Vietnam vets’ lack of love for this country.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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Enjoy!
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Huzzah! The interminable 2008 Senate election in Minnesota has finally been decided, and we’ll soon be able to address Al Franken as Senator Al Franken. In honor of the occasion, I’m going to repost an old interview with Stephen Colbert from The Al Franken Show, co-hosted by Katherine Lanpher (we originally posted it here). I apologize again for the quality of the audio, but it should still be accessible here. The interview was originally posted by moveleft (a site that is no longer being maintained), and I loosely transcribed a portion below:
KL: … He’s joining us here in the studio; welcome to “The Al Franken Show”.
Stephen: Thank you for having me. First of all, I want to, ah, I want to agree with Al. [KL laughter] And I want to praise his metaphor, uh, for clogging the – the toilet that journalism’s going down. I’ve used the metaphor myself. Probably not first. I was probably copying you.
AF: No, I was – I must have, subconsciously, copied you.
Stephen: I like to think “The Daily Show” takes the information from the day, and we digest it, we pre-digest it, for the audience … and then we pinch out a turd of truth for the audience. We polish it, [Franken: Mmm-hmmm] and then we present it for the audience.
AF: “Turd-polishing” is a comedy writer term.
Stephen: Right. It is.
AF: Hey, are you ever, um … I remember I used to do, in the old days, “Saturday Night Live,” like, this thing called …
Stephen: Mmm-hmm.
AF: … this thing called “Point-Counterpoint,” on “Update”.
Stephen: Yeah, I remember it.
AF: And I realized that what I was doing was what they were doing on “60 Minutes,” which was a “Point-Counterpoint” kind of thing …
Stephen: Right.
AF: … and then, and, but, adding jokes to it. Do you – do you ever, does it ever amaze you that basically what you do is exactly what they do, except with a “value added”? In other words, there are people who have your job except that they don’t add …
Stephen: … Put quite as much thought into it?
AF: [Laughing] Do you know what I mean?
Stephen: Yeah, I do! I do. I mean, I – I actually, I really … I like the news … I don’t know what to do without it, and there are journalists that I like. But I do sometimes think, oh, how much easier would this be if I was *just* reporting the news? [KL laughter] Because … I – trying to think of a joke about – and also getting the, enough information out to inform the audience enough so they would *get* my joke? Is doing the news job as it is. People say, like, they get their news from “The Daily Show,” it’s only incidental that we do that; we don’t really want to change the world through mime. We just – we’re making jokes. But to do so, we have to tell them the news so the broadest possible audience understands our joke. But we’re kind of doing a news job already, so I – I often think, ah, if I was *just* stopping here in this thing I’m writing! Like the thing I was writing today, if I was just stopping here …
AF: What are you writing today?
Stephen: Well, today it was about the Oscars. About how it’s over for the white actor. [KL and AF laughing] There’s just nothing; there’s really, there’s really nothing left for them. I mean, I think we’re heralding the end of the white actor as we knew him. I mean, a lot of those parts that we saw today, there was a time in Hollywood when those would have been played by –
AF: Morgan Freeman.
Stephen: … by white actors. I mean in the 1920s, those could have been white guys playing …
AF: Anthony Quinn would have played …
Stephen: … Morgan Freeman’s part; exactly.
AF: You know, Morgan Freeman, what a great actor.
Stephen: He’s great, but – but [adopting "Stephen Colbert" voice] seriously, Al. A Black guy playing a Black guy? Where’s the stretch, there? A white guy playing that part would have been … that’s acting. Making that believable?
AF: I take your point. Do you … [the] thing about Morgan Freeman … I wrote this line in a book once, is that no one respects a slave unless he’s *played* by Morgan Freeman. [Beat] Anyway.
Stephen: Or that guy from Amistad. But he was hot.
AF: I wanna play something you did; which was your take on the Gannon-Guckert story. Let’s play a little bit of that …
[Full clip here, courtesy of Comedy Central's MotherLoad]
AF: Okay, now … [KL laughing] Why do you think – we were discussing this before we got on – I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to leave it in the locker room; that’s what we call it.
Stephen: That’s another comedy term.
AF: Yeah. Don’t leave it in the locker room. Okay … but – but let’s talk about this. This is a – a huge story to me, which is that -. And if the Clinton administration had done it, there would be a couple of, there would be a House investigation of it, a Senate investigation of it. Why do you suppose that this Guckert-Gannon thing, and, and every one of our listeners probably knows, this is about the former male prostitute who really wasn’t a reporter, who got a White House press pass before he actually was on “Talon News”, right?
Stephen: I … I don’t know; I know that he was turned down by the congressional press office.
AF: Right.
Stephen: And normally, you have to get that before you get a White House press office pass. But he got it, anyway.
AF: So why do you suppose that this isn’t enormous? I mean … they’ve been paying guys like Armstrong Williams, like Maggie Gallagher, now this. Why isn’t this a bigger story?
Stephen: I can think of two reasons. One is, I think … somehow, you know, uh, uh … Who, who was it who said, the greatest trick the Devil ever played on man was convincing him that he didn’t exist? [Editor's note: Keyser Soze?] Um, and in the same way, one of the greatest tricks that the – the Right, or the Bush administration, has played on – ah, really, just the Right has played on – the American public is that journalism doesn’t exist. And the idea that, “Uh, listen, people ask questions, that’s ‘journalism’!” It’s like saying ‘Fox News’. “Well, we’re ‘news’ … We’ve got graphics, we’ve got people in front of desks, and, um, look at the teeth on this woman! She’s clearly an anchor!” [AF laughing] You know? … As if the form – as if the *form*, itself, is the thing. And that’s, that’s driven a lot, obviously, by TV. You know? Because it’s all form. Um, and so the fact that somebody turns out to not have any credentials or have an odd background; well, does that really make him not a legitimate reporter in most people’s eyes? I don’t know whether it does. Because reporting itself, or the idea of journalism itself, which is in itself a liberal effect because it investigates power, at its best. And that kind of iconoclastic, status quo attacking, um, is … it’s a liberal virtue; it’s not a conservative virtue. So, the basic virtue of journalism has to be called into question by the Right and, therefore, *all* of journalism has to be called into question by the Right, so the fact that someone turns out to be false doesn’t mean anything because they’ve asked us to not think that journalism has any objective standards. Which would be applied to the Right’s journalists, the Fox people, if you held to them. So, by demeaning journalism altogether, you keep someone from – Gannon – from really being a big scandal. Have, have I made myself obscure?
AF: Yea – no, you’ve made yourself clearer, because … the thing with Fox is, they now have a slogan; do you remember “Fair and Balanced”?
Stephen: I do. I do remember that.
AF: Okay, that they’ve kept. But, but they precede it now with, “Real Journalism”. [Laughing]
Stephen: That’s nice.
AF: Which is like a restaurant saying, “Real gourmet food”. [AF and Stephen laughing] And it is, it is a sort of a diminishment of what journalism is, where they go, like, “We’re fair and balanced. Uh, okay, we’re not really; you know, we’re a ‘balance’ to the left wing. So we’re really – we’re right wing. Yeah. But we’re fair and balanced and … whatever you want. Listen, we’re just sayin’ it, okay? [Stephen: Mmm hmm.] Wink wink.” And it does sort, uh, of say, okay, journalism -. That’s an interesting analysis, which is …
Stephen: ‘Journalism’ doesn’t mean much any more.
AF: Yeah.
Stephen: ‘Cause people like Armstrong Williams are saying, “Hey, I run a company also! [AF laughing] The money was for the company, not for the journalism!”
AF: Yeah. We’re gonna come back with Stephen Colbert, who’s a senior correspondent for – at Comedy Central’s fake news program, “The Daily Show” …
Congratulations, Al!
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Episode 5089 (6/30/2009)
By · CommentsEPISODE NUMBER: 5089 (June 30, 2009)
GUEST: Alexi Lalas, Kevin Mattson
SEGMENTS: War on the 4th of July, Is it time to care about soccer?
VIDEOS: Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Just a quick reminder to the Zoners – let’s do our best to keep our Episode Guide comments on-topic. We only have one thread to discuss each show, and I think the conversation flows better when the comments stay focused on the show at hand. Thanks for helping us keep this blog both shiny and happy!
Did you see that teeny, tiny swish of hair on the top of Stephen’s hair? IT’S GROWING, Y’ALL! How exciting! But not nearly as exciting as Al Franken finally being allowed to be Senator! Whoo!!! I’m all about the callback on the show, and I laughed quite hard at the War On Easter Fourth of July recycled graphic. Another recycled joke that I loved was the “you can grate cheese on that” – how many of us remember that line being used to describe Brad Pitt’s abs?
Kevin Mattson was really starting to freak me out – he’s so Will Forte in 15 years. I do admire him for sticking to his talking points despite the fact that Stephen was very “Stephen” tonight.
What kind of love did you have for the show tonight?
- Yes, I also express sadness through cheering and applause. It’s like my left hand is Al Franken and my right hand keeps slapping him.
- Plus who can trust the court’s ruling so soon after the death of Michael Jackson?
- What a f@#king a$$hole.
- I feel like we’re rolling the dice here having an untested guy in the US Senate, when remember, people, we are still fighting two wars – the war on Christmas, and the war on Easter.
- War on the 4th of July – We didn’t have time to do a new graphic, but a gun-toting Jesus is appropriate for any occasion. Because everyone knows in 1776, Jesus joined the Continental Congress representing the colony of Heaven-sylvania and signed the Declaration of Independence. Then he pulled Washington across the Delaware and ascended into the sky in a beautiful explosion of color.
- I say an abandoned gas plant is a perfect place to shoot off fireworks. The pyrotechnics could last for weeks.
- These animals should thank us for liberating them from the British. If we hadn’t, all nature documentaries would look like this [Benny Hill theme].
- Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about this sport, but that is before we were good at it.
- By the way, Spain is expected to make a full recovery.
- Soccer is so engrained into Brazilian culture that you can’t even be born without getting past a goalie.
- How long have I been asleep? Do I have a beard?
- Pro – Fun Scarves
- And [the scarves] are useful – “Yoo hoo! Beer man! More warm beer please! Here let me get my 3 euros, and 2 euros for the tax.”
- You could grate cheese on that stomach. Cheese that American athletes would then eat.
- Con-Low Scores
- Pro – Rioting
- I say against Mexico we build a giant wall down the field.
- WE’RE GOING TO WIN THE WORLD CUP!
- Which was longer, that speech or the title of the book?
- He was the original Blame America Firster.
- It’s like if your wife says, Do these pants make me look fat, you say No, they don’t. Carter said, we looked a little chunky.
- Carter, worst president, or worsted president?
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Hey, remember when General Raymond Odierno cut off the most beautiful head known to the Colbert Nation? Yeah, well he’s got a little something to say about the current ‘do, according to CNN.
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Our favorite 6-time ‘Colbert Report’ guest, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is all over the place promoting “NOVA scienceNOW,’’ which launches its fourth season tonight at 9 on PBS. Tyson spent some time dishing about the appeal of being interviewed by ‘The Daily Show’ and the ‘Colbert Report’ over at Boston.com:
Cosmically speaking
By Joanna Weiss
Globe Staff / June 30, 2009Q. I suspect you’re one of the few astrophysicists who have gabbed with Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert.
A. Both Stewart and Colbert frequently have scientists in ways that Jay Leno never did. That was not a part of his show, even though it was a part of Johnny Carson’s. That’s where Carl Sagan got most of his public exposure.
Q. I guess Colbert knows his audience will have an interest in science.
A. I’m going to make a stronger statement. I’m going to say that he trusts the intelligence of his audience to know that they would take an interest in science.
Q. Do you do anything different to prepare for the comedy shows?
A. Oh, hell, yes. Colbert’s by far my hardest interview. My second hardest interview is Jon Stewart. Everybody else is a distant third. I’ve got to know what did Paris Hilton do last week? What did the Pope say on Tuesday? Who won “American Idol’’? It’s a pop culture exposure that I need at my fingertips. It’s like a tennis serve: I’ve got to get a racket on it.
I just friggin’ love him. In case you missed it, here is Tyson’s interview from last night.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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The Colorado Daily blog broke a very interesting story about the possibility of someone being interviewed during their unique stand on Easter. Click through for all the details!
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