In among the plethora of tickets we bought for special outings on this trip – everything from the Cirque du Soleil, Monster Trucks, MET Opera and ice hockey games – we also picked up some tickets to be in the studio audience to go watch a taping of The Colbert Report. Mr K is a huge fan, it sort of hits all bases with him… politics, comedy, satire and, in particular, making fun of Republicans. A lot.
We head across town to W54th between 10th and 11th Avenues (the ‘other’ side of town from our hotel 😉 ) in the freezing cold, and I mean it was about 3C with an apparently temp of about -2C, whereupon we got to line up for over two hours. Thankfully there was a covered alley way with cafe blinds, for the punters and even some outdoor heaters to make the wait a little more bearable. We were lined up with some girls from Washington, and seeing we were going to be stuck there a while I thought I’d strike up a conversation with them. It turns out one of the girls worked in copyright and intellectual property patenting for the Library of Congress (where we visited just last week) and her friend works in Internal Oversight for the IRS at Treasury. Both were very obviously Democratic in their political persuasion and had some very balanced views on many of the pressing issues of the day. Refreshingly they didn’t seem to mind hearing some foreigners impertinent opinions on the US, so we had a couple of hours of lively conversation which made the wait pass so much quicker.
Eventually we were ushered into the anteroom to wait to go in for the show taping, after some vague and haphazard security screening. We got told that there were no bathroom breaks and there was no coming and going from the taping once they got going, so a massive queue immediately formed for the ladies room. I only mention this because it was the slowest moving ladies room queue I have ever seen in my life! Couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was taking each person so long to use the bathroom… until I got in there and noticed this silly poster and figured that between the stripping off and on of layers, somewhere in there many of the women must have been stopping to photograph this particularly ridiculous sign. Sigh… no wonder it was taking so long.
We were ushered through into the studio and given a warm up act to remind us that we needed to be loud and raucous and boisterous and over the top excited to be on the show. That our voices were the soundtrack for the show as they don’t use a laugh track. The warm up dude made a few jokes and got the level of noise and excitement going that they wanted, as is his job I guess, and then he introduced Stephen Colbert who was coming out to talk to us before assuming character for the show for a bit of a quick Q&A. We got told there would be an opportunity to ask some questions and plenty of people were preparing questions among themselves while they were waiting.
First question – “Did you know that there is a wax model of you at Madame Tussaud’s? And did you have to sit for it and stuff?” There was a whole episode on his wax model ages ago, and yes, they all sit for those stupid things so of course he knew all about it. Only thing he did tell her that it’s possible that not everyone was aware of, was that he licked the wax statue of himself… because he could and because it annoyed the Madame Tussaud’s people. Next questions, equally banal: “If you took your Sanity Pills, what duet would you sing with Bill O’Reilly?” to which Stephen sung an answer quick as a whip, “Anything you can do I can do better…”
Then we got a real corker. A lady behind us started this exchange – Audience chickie: “I am a Communications Major”; Stephen: “Good for you.”; Audience chickie: “I am doing an assignment at the moment, on gender in fandom and would love to hear your take on the role of women in The Lord of The Rings…” WTF? Most people know he is a huge LoTR and Hobbit fan, but we were not expecting that. Anyway, without skipping a beat, Stephen launches into a well framed and extremely well thought out diatribe about how all the men in LoTR marry up, and area basically bolstering their positions and their worthy by marrying these incredibly strong and morally superior female characters… and then he went on and on, outlining each female character’s positive attributes and how they were decidedly more important and possessing more intestinal fortitude than many of the male characters. He then theorised that Galadriel (sp?) was arguably more superior to even Gandalf in the overall plot, and for someone speaking off the cuff, about a topic he is obviously very well versed in and very familiar with, he was extremely impressive. What I would give to have recorded that. He was fantastic… and talk about thinking on your feet. Huge respect.
Anyway, after that very amusing and intellectually stimulating interlude, the taping began. It was kinda surreal. The crowd is all going wild as they start to tape the show, and Colbert is talking away at the camera and we can’t hear a thing he is saying over the noise we are all being encouraged to make! So we miss the first few gags… something about testing out the bottomless margaritas on Spring Break, and he launched straight into it.
His guest for the evening was Bryan Cranston who, after his massive success as Walter White in Breaking Bad, is now doing a role on Broadway in ‘All The Way’, a play about Lyndon Johnson and his strong civil rights agenda. Apparently it is a great new show and Cranston is a fantastic character actor and claims the role is Shakespearean in it’s intensity – Lyndon is like Lear in his opinion. Sounds like it would be a good one to see. And then there was another small bit and that was the end of the show. Whole thing took barely half an hour after all that waiting!
And for the first time ever, we didn’t file out through a gift shop on our way out of the place. Huge wasted opportunity if you ask me, nearly everyone there would have bought a coffee mug or a poster or a god knows what else if an opportunity to purchase merchandise was made available at that point. Never mind.
All up, it was quite a surreal experience and lots of fun. Rounded off our New York experienced nicely.