Here's Stephen Colbert...

I wrote in today's square (Sept. 8, 2015) on my calendar months ago, "Colbert starts the Late Show" noting that in tonight's broadcast of The Late Show on CBS Stephen Colbert will take the reigns from the legendary David Letterman. My daughters have commented on my calendar note with some concern. They might have a good reason to query me after witnessing my nearly daily viewing of Colbert's former show - Comedy Central's The Colbert Report - a daily satirical news show with Colbert's character, "Steven Colbert," parodying the bombastic style of political TV pundits.

I have always watched late-night TV.  On the weekends I tuned into Saturday Night Live and still flip it on in time to catch Weekend Update most weeks.  As for the weeknights, I was first drawn to Carson, then Leno and Letterman, and then O'Brian.  However, once Leno lost his edge my interest wained and I boycotted him all together after he had O'Brian fired so he could re-join the Tonight Show.  Subsiquently, O'Brian moved out of my reach since I don't have cable.  Letterman settled in at CBS and ultimately began to just coast, then I drifted away.  I have never really given Jimmy Kimmel a chance.  So finally in recent years my late-night viewing moved to streaming late-night shows of a political bent during daylight hours. Having always loved satire and I found Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I fell completely in love with them during the 2008 U.S. Presidential Campaigns.

After the election I stayed, and I became an even bigger fan of Colbert. Two things sealed the deal. An interview on NPR where Colbert shared that he teaches Sunday School (when asked to share something people might not know about him), and a 2010 Christmas rant about faith, politics and poverty that ended with: “If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”  I have been trying to figure out how to get this TV sermon into conversations, sermons, classes, and worship services ever since.

So now, as Colbert takes over The Late Show, there has been a lot of interest and speculation in who will show up - the real Stephen Colbert, or the finely crafted character used on his former show. The fascinating thing here is how well the satire has been done. With Colbert the satirical line between the real and the ridiculous has been blurred to a point that discussion about the nature of the real Stephen Colbert is a necessity. The irony for me is that in recent years what has made me admire Colbert the most has been his transparency in interviews - the times he has shown us who he really is.  In particuar his openness about joy, suffering and humanity.

I have often quoted his statements in the 2009 RollingStone magazine feature on him.
Check out these truths:

"I have this on my computer [removes a piece of paper taped to his computer]. It says, "Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God."

"Not to get too deep here, but the most valuable thing I can think of is to be grateful for suffering. That is a sublime feeling, and completely inexplicable and illogical, but no one doesn't suffer. So the degree to which you can be aware of your own humanity is the degree to which you can accept, with open eyes, your suffering. To be grateful for your suffering is to be grateful for your humanity, because what else are you going to do – say, "No, thanks"? It's there. "Smile and accept," said Mother Teresa. And she was talking to people who had it rough. That's not how you make jokes, though."

"
I have another little piece of paper back here [removes a piece of paper taped to the edge of his desk]. It just says, "Work," because nothing ever gets better unless you work. So I have "work" here and "joy" over there, and I try to put the two together somehow."

He was just as transparent over the summer in a GQ article. Note these insights:

“Tragedy is sacred,” he said. “People's suffering is sacred.”

"I'm very grateful to be alive, even though I know a lot of dead people.” The urge to be grateful, he said, is not a function of his faith. It's not “the Gospel tells us” and therefore we give thanks. It is what he has always felt: grateful to be alive. “And so that act, that impulse to be grateful, wants an object. That object I call God. Now, that could be many things. I was raised in a Catholic tradition. I'll start there. That's my context for my existence, is that I am here to know God, love God, serve God, that we might be happy with each other in this world and with Him in the next—the catechism. That makes a lot of sense to me. I got that from my mom. And my dad. And my siblings.”

Speaking on the death of his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was 10:
“ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

So tonight when Stephen Colbert takes over the The Late Show I'll be watching. I'll be watching to see which Colbert shows up, but I'll also be watching the Colbert that knows "I am here to know God, love God, serve God," and the fellow traveler who has learned "to love the bomb" because what else are you going to do – say, "No, thanks"?

Joel K

Stephen Colbert was also a guest in the most recent season of the excellent show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. You can see that episode here