Stephen Colbert: Trump Is Beyond Satire

By Jake Sherman and Daniel Lippman, Politico

17 July 16

"The Late Show" host on Trump, Clinton and finding the humor in an election season that's already become a joke.

tephen Colbert — the host of CBS’s “The Late Show” — is planning to drop into the summer’s political conventions for “a couple of days,” but will jet back to New York in the evening to air his show live in a stark departure from the taped and often staid nature of the late night shows.

Colbert’s plan — which he unveiled for the first time in a Playbook Interview Wednesday — is an attempt to keep his show essential during the eight convention days in Cleveland and Philadelphia.

“What we enjoy most is being topical at the top of the show,” Colbert said. He added, “Our favorite thing is something happens at 5 o’clock on the day of a show and we can do it on the show at 5:30, which is when we tape. … And I don’t really want to lose that opportunity just because the event that everybody is going to be talking about happened at 10 o’clock that night.”

The move comes just months after Colbert got a new executive producer and show runner: Chris Licht, who helped launch “CBS This Morning” and was the early brains behind “Morning Joe.”

The logistics of doing a live show on big convention nights are extremely tight. So Colbert’s team of writers will rehearse twice in the afternoon before they “hunker down in front of the convention that night,” split across two or three rooms, he said. “[Me] and my executive producers will bounce room to room … and turn that into the monologue as quickly as we can. If the convention really ends a little bit before 11, that gives us about a half an hour to put the show together.”

More from Colbert:

On Trump: “Donald’s a friend. We’re from the same industry: entertainment. And I doubt that there is a joke that you could make about Donald Trump that would actually upset him. I really think so, because Lord knows we’ve tried. And he is still open to coming on the show, and he’s — I think he understands entertainment. I don’t think he takes these comedy shows seriously.”

On how to satirize Trump: “He’s a tremendous gift — the fact that there were 17 of them to start with was — I’m not going to say fish in a barrel, but something in a barrel. And you could hardly miss if you just made a choice to watch what was happening on the Republican side, because of the different options. The difficulty is leapfrogging how crazy Trump is. If you really want to satirize someone, you can either — my character in the old days — you can try to leapfrog their behavior, which is one reason I’m glad I don’t do my character anymore. I don’t know how you can leap from what he does.”

On why you can’t satirize Trump: “It’s hard to hold his feet to the fire — like, ‘This is what you said, this is what you’ve done’ — because what he says changes every day. So you end up criticizing on style as much as substance all the time. Because his style is lack of consistent substance.”

Do Trump and Colbert chat off air? “No comment. I’m going to refer you to counsel on that one,” he said with a laugh.

On how to joke about Hillary Clinton: “The fact that she lied to Congress helps! That really came in handy! One on one, she’s absolutely charming and human and you just don’t understand why [when] there are more than five people in a room she turns into, like, the host of a poorly rated local access children’s show. She becomes very stiff and almost agonizingly needy to express her humanity.”

On the ‘rigged’ Democratic primary: “The first half of this election, on the Democratic side, they were rigged for silent running. They had debates, but they were scheduling them at 3 a.m. on the Sunday before Christmas. They really just wanted to get out of the way of the Republicans. So as much as we wanted to tag jokes onto what the Democrats were doing, it was difficult on Mrs. Clinton until the clarity came on her not entirely forthcoming answers on her emails. It was mostly Bernie on that side. Because he wanted a lot of attention. Mrs. Clinton was like a ghost candidate. That was difficult on that side.”

On covering the conventions: “The convention has its own agenda … it lives in a bubble. It actually takes you out of the daily news, and it’s an industrial for a corporation. The Democratic corporation, the Republican corporation, an annual sales meeting for themselves, and you’re reporting on someone’s sales meeting. And taking someone’s PR and sales at their face value is also a lot of fun.”

On the GOP platform: “Really? Is that really your message? You really want to put in your platform that porn is the public health crisis of our time? You really want to say coal is a clean energy? Not even clean coal, just coal? They debated whether Oreos should be available for food stamps when they were making the Republican platform.”