Q: How will your new late-night show, "The Colbert Report," be different from Jon Stewart's, "The Daily Show," on which you have appeared for years as a fake senior news correspondent?
Stephen Colbert.
The character will not change. He's the exact same guy from "The Daily Show," and he has just been promoted into the host's chair. We're trying to establish a persona here. He's a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot.
Will you continue the tradition of political satire that allowed "The Daily Show" to inject so much welcome gravity into the light, goofy realm of late-night TV?
Jon would be so happy as a comedian to hear that he injected gravity. Can I be the one to tell him?
Seriously, what do you have against gravity?
If we thought we added gravity to anything, we would feel that we had failed. We're just trying to ease the pain of people who feel the world is going insane and no one is noticing. We're like Cortaid, something not too heavy that is used for a rash or a bug bite. I wouldn't use it for a wound.
I think you're underestimating the influence the show has had. People might perceive it as substantive because the jokes happen to be political.
But I guarantee you that it has no political objective. I think it's dangerous for a comedian to say, "I have a political objective." Because then they stop being a comedian and they start being a politician. Or a lobbyist.
I just read somewhere that jokes are less popular than they used to be.
You mean like, "Two guys walk into a bar"? I think you are right. I get e-mailed jokes a lot - by friends who are not in the business. Jokes live on in e-mail. E-mail has become a museum of jokes.
Why do you have a framed poster of Richard Nixon hanging in your studio?
It makes me happy to think of Nixon as my president. He's funny. Or at least he used to be funny. Steve Martin said in 1976 that making Nixon jokes was like making Ike jokes. He had been used so much - the orange has been juiced completely.
I don't know any Ike jokes, do you?
Maybe it's time to bring them back. Ike was before my time. I will have to ask my older brothers and sisters. They say he was a very nice man.
I hear you grew up as the youngest of 11 children in a small town outside Charleston, S.C., the son of a doctor. Was your childhood as warm and fuzzy as it sounds?
I was very loved. My sisters like to say that they are surprised that I learned to walk and that my legs didn't become vestigial because I got carried around by them so much.
Then how did you ever develop a sense of humor?
Freud claimed that people don't develop a sense of humor until their sense of childhood happiness has vanished. I think comedians are in some way damaged.
How are you damaged?
[Long pause.] I lost several members of my family when I was a child. My father and two of my brothers, the next two up from me. I was 10 years old, and the three of them died in an airplane crash. It was pretty bad.
I'm so sorry. I had no idea.
I don't generally talk about it.
Can we talk a bit about your own nuclear family? You live in suburban New Jersey with your wife and three children.
I have a wife who loves me, and I am oddly normative. I go to church. I would say that there would be plenty of Catholics in the world who would think of me as not that observant, but for the world I move in professionally, I seem monastic.
What are you like as a dad?
I read to the children most nights. They are 10, 7 and 3. I am big on hugging. We are very silly. We fall down for each other. We do pratfalls.
Do they stay up to watch you on "The Daily Show"?
No. I don't let them watch. I don't want my kids to perceive me as a performer.
What do they think you do?
I tell them I am a chiropodist. I think that's a chiropractor for feet.
