Stephen Colbert Hits The Comeback Trail

Early last year, he was the Jeb Bush of late night: the presumptive victor in a crowded field he was entering. Then the competition (for both) changed. Now, the onetime king of political satire is live for the conventions, just in time for him to rebound and reset (with an assist from Jon Stewart). Of the criticism and those rumors? ‘I’m a human being. Yeah, I care’

- Marisa Guthrie

“I’M SORRY, JON AND I ARE QUITE HAPPY here making jerky and canning our own urine for the end of times,” says Stephen Colbert.

It is Monday, July 18, and Jon Stewart and Colbert are on the Ed Sullivan Theater stage in New York taping a bit for tonight’s Late Show that will mark the return of the supremely unctuous fictional newscaster Colbert played for 10 years on Comedy Central. It also kicks off eight days of live shows during the Republican and Democratic conventions.

In the bit, Stewart, dressed in a blue plaid bathrobe and slippers and drinking from a tin cup, is living in a cabin in the woods with the fictional Colbert of The Colbert Report. (In real life, Stewart, who also is an executive producer on CBS’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, actually has been living on his farm in New Jersey, somewhat off the grid, tending to a menagerie of pigs, goats and chickens.)

The bit is called Trumpiness, a play on “truthiness,” the Colbert-coined term to describe the from-the-gut, perception-is reality ethos ushered in by George W. Bush. And Donald Trump – with his penchant to embellish, exaggerate and, depending on your point of view, outright lie – just may be the human apotheosis of the word. So the real Colbert has sought out his alter ego to help put into context the inexplicable: Donald Trump is thisclose to moving into the White House.