PLUME: Who were your troop mates at that time?

COLBERT: I was hired the same day as Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, Scott Allman, Rose Abdoo, Ian Gomez, Jenna Jolovitz, and Chris Farley.

PLUME: What kind of bond forms with that kind of freshman class type atmosphere?

COLBERT: We were all - we felt thrilled and privileged to be about to be paid for what we loved to do.

PLUME: Were there any bad feelings or clashes - resentment - between the established members and the sort of freshmen members?

COLBERT: We wanted to be them. We weren’t tearing down anyone. We wanted their jobs.

PLUME: If I understand correctly, Second City’s always had a bit of a caste system…

COLBERT: Yeah, there is. There’s the touring company, and then there’s different sort of castes within the touring company. Which company you’re in… do you get the good gigs? Do you get to tour the ski resorts for a month, or are you doing one night in Bloomington, Indiana?

PLUME: With the ultimate goal being, what, the main stage?

COLBERT: Yeah.

COLBERT: I don’t know about the difficulty - I mean, everything seems difficult when you’re doing it, I think. Because you’re working as hard as you can, if you succeed at all, you work as hard as you can and we were all working as hard as we could. You know, it happened incrementally, so by the time you got to main stage, it didn’t feel like, “Wow, I made it!” It felt like, “Okay, well, it seems fairly logical that I’m here.” You know, “I didn’t completely suck, compared to my co-workers, and so I guess I belong here.” But no one was leaping up in the air and going, “I made it!” So obviously, we should have.

PLUME: Wasn’t this around the same time that Bob Odenkirk made his …

COLBERT: Odenkirk was a little bit before me.

PLUME: …Direct transition to the main stage…

COLBERT: Yeah, I had just been hired to the touring company when he did that. So, I wasn’t any part of any of those feelings.

PLUME: Was there a natural gravitation towards working with Amy and Paul?

COLBERT: Yeah, we shared a sensibility.

PLUME: Is it a sensibility that can be summed up, or is it just a gut feeling?

COLBERT: It really was more gut. We certainly didn’t put it into words then, and we’ve tried to put it into words since, and I don’t think it ever really covers it very well.

PLUME: Within Second City, is there a definite feeling of, “This is the career progression…” - that you move onto SNL, or you move onto …

COLBERT: There’s less of that than you think. I think people there really were just there to do the work there. You could tell if somebody was looking at it as a stepping stone to something else, and I don’t think they did very good work.

PLUME: What were the feelings when Chris left?

COLBERT: Very happy for him.

PLUME: Was there a sense of, “That will be the direction I’m going in, as well.”

COLBERT: No, not necessarily. I never imagined that that was going to be where I would end up.

PLUME: What lead to your eventual brief association with SNL?

COLBERT: Oh, that was - I was working for a show called The Dana Carvey Show. I had written some things for that show, that Robert Smigel - who was our executive producer - brought over to SNL. As a result, I got a short-term writing gig over there. I helped Robert put his cartoons over there, and I still do.

PLUME: An atmosphere that you enjoyed?

COLBERT: I did. I did, actually. It was very hard work, but I liked it.

PLUME: The cartoon would be, what - predominately The Ambiguously Gay Duo?

COLBERT: Yeah, but his other Saturday TV Fun House stuff, too.

PLUME: Was that the time that you started doing the voices as well?

COLBERT: Yeah, I’d actually started with the voices and we’d be talking about the scripts, and I would help him rewrite them. He said, “Why don’t you just help me write these?”

PLUME: At what point did Exit 57, as a concept, come up?

COLBERT: That was before The Dana Carvey Show. That was Paul and Amy had gone to New York to do a play of Amy’s brother’s, and while they were there, the people who had seen us at Second City also came and saw this play, called Stitches. They were approached about doing a sketch show for HBO Downtown Productions, that they helped us out at Comedy Central. They said, “Remember that guy, Stephen Colbert, in Chicago? We’d like to involve him, too.” So, that was that and I left Second City and I came to New York. I moved to New York to do that.

PLUME: What was the process of putting those shows together? I’m assuming the budgets weren’t terribly high.

COLBERT: No. Those were like, “Well, here’s an idea. A guy gets woken up by a jackhammer. The jackhammer operator …” and our producers would say, “First of all, before you go any further - do you have a jackhammer? Because I don’t have a jackhammer.” So, that sums up what our budgets were like. “Do you have a horse? Because I don’t have a horse.”

PLUME: The show lasted two seasons, right?

COLBERT: Yeah.

PLUME: It’s a shame they’re not still showing it.

COLBERT: I don’t know about that, I’ve seen some of them since. I think shame could be associated with it, but not necessarily with not showing.

PLUME: Well, it’s better than some of the sketch shows that are actually still currently airing.

COLBERT: Well, maybe.

PLUME: How did that process evolve into your participation in The Daily Show?

COLBERT: It didn’t, actually. After that was cancelled, then I worked for The Dana Carvey Show about six months after that, and that lasted like six months. Then I had a year where I wasn’t doing anything. Then a year later, I got hired for The Daily Show. There was a long period of time - it was a whole new administration at Comedy Central. There really wasn’t an association between the two things.

PLUME: This was, what, after the departure after [network head] Doug Herzog?

COLBERT: No, this was when Doug first got there.

PLUME: What were the concerns during that year of unemployment?

COLBERT: Oh, not being able to feed my wife and child. Pay rent. I thought I made a huge mistake in what I decided to do for a living.

PLUME: Did it get to the point where you actually considered not doing it for a living?

COLBERT: No, it was too late. That’s the big concern. Like, you couldn’t just turn back. It wasn’t like I was going to go to law school. It was too late. The die was cast.

PLUME: Stuck in the New York area?

COLBERT: Yeah, and I didn’t really know anybody in New York. I knew a lot of people in Chicago, but New York, I was a complete neophyte.

PLUME: Was there anything that popped up during that year, or was it just a complete year …

COLBERT: I helped Dana write a movie. I worked for VH1 for a while, I worked for MTV for a while. It was sort of just make-work, like script consultant stuff.

PLUME: I’m assuming you were still freelancing with Robert?

COLBERT: Yes, I was, actually. But, if you think you can feed a child on that …

PLUME: No, I don’t see how you could. So, how big of a boon was the appearance of The Daily Show on the horizon?

COLBERT: It was nothing. I did not believe in the show, I did not watch the show, and they paid dirt. It was literally just sort of - it was just a paycheck to show up.

PLUME: That was when they first started, with Lizz Winstead still on staff…

COLBERT: Lizz Winstead, Madeleine Smithberg, and Craig Kilborn.

PLUME: Which I understand was a tension-filled time…

COLBERT: Yeah, I guess Lizz and Craig didn’t get along… that’s what I understand. Again, I was so new there that I was kept completely out of any sort of political machinations there.

PLUME: So it’s nothing that filtered out to the crew or the cast.

COLBERT: Other than the fact that Craig said, in an article in Esquire, that she’d blow him if he asked her, and that got him suspended for a week.

PLUME: How would you compare the pieces that you did then, and the involvement you had in the show then, to what you have now?

COLBERT: Those were more character driven pieces. First of all, there were no desk pieces. Correspondents didn’t do stuff like editorializing at the desk. The field pieces we did were character driven pieces - like, you know, guys who believe in Bigfoot. Whereas now, everything is issue and news driven pieces, and a lot of editorializing at the desk. And a lot of use of the green screen to put us in false locations.

PLUME: That’s what, merely more of a budget issue than anything else?

COLBERT: No, no, no. It’s editorial tone that Jon has changed. We’re more of a news show - we were more of a magazine show then.

PLUME: I hear a lot regarding how involved Jon is in the show, and I’m wondering if there was that same kind of involvement in the pieces you did, and the tone of the show, when Craig was there?

COLBERT: No, he wasn’t involved in the field department at all.

PLUME: So is it almost a night-and-day difference in the tone of the show?

COLBERT: No, it really wasn’t night-and-day, because you had the same writers, the same executive producer, Madeleine Smithberg. You had the same correspondents - at first. And so, it was a gradual evolution. Jon didn’t come in and say, “It’s closing time, folks.” He came in and said, “And let’s see if we can’t push this is this direction. Let’s see if we can’t maybe make the field pieces reflect something that’s happening in the headlines of the day, so there’s more of a natural transition, the show doesn’t change tonally, completely.” Which it would often do, from headlines into field pieces. It would be, like, something fairly clever about the Clinton administration - and then straight into a guy who was a Bigfoot hunter. It was quite jarring. That was the first thing I noticed, was that our field pieces were coming out of the news, and not in sort of opposition to them.

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