Overview (3)

Mini Bio (1)

Spouse (1)

Trade Mark (7)

Parodies of well known political and media figures



Politically-edged humor



His glasses



Delivers ridiculous lines of dialogue with complete seriousness and sincerity



Often raises one eyebrow



Coming up with fictional titles that are very long



Using his encyclopedic knowledge of Lord Of The Rings and William Shakespeare



Trivia (43)

An alumnus of the Second City and Annoyance Theatre in Chicago, IL. Graduated from Northwestern University in 1986.



Is deaf in his right ear.



The youngest of 11 children, Stephen served as an altar boy for 11 years.





Is a huge "Lord of the Rings" fan and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the series. Specifically recited the entire biography of LOTR character Aragorn from memory when Viggo Mortensen appeared on The Daily Show (1996). Mortensen sent him a platter full of LOTR characters carved out of chocolate.



Was included in the Peabody Award given to The Daily Show: Indecision 2002: Election Night (2002) for "offering biting political satire, these scintillating segments had something droll and amusing to say about almost everything and everyone associated with American politics and the presidential election.".



All of his three children have appeared on The Daily Show (1996).

His father and two of his brothers died in a plane crash when he was ten years old. On September 11, 1974, they were on an Eastern Airlines DC-9 that crashed in dense fog during its approach to Charlotte, NC. Of the 82 people on board, 72 were killed. In its report, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that "the probable cause of the accident was the flight crew's lack of altitude awareness at critical points during the approach due to poor cockpit discipline in that the crew did not follow prescribed procedures.".





He was briefly a correspondent on Good Morning America (1975).



Voiced several characters on Comedy Central's Crank Yankers (2002).

"Truthiness," a word he coined, was declared the Word of the Year 2005 by the American Dialect Society.



Has stated that not all of his family members say "Colbert" the way he does. Some pronounce the latter syllable as "Burt".





Father, with wife Evie Colbert , of three children: daughter Madeline Colbert, and sons Peter Colbert and John Colbert.

Is in the process of putting together news pieces about every congressional district in the United States.



Teaches Sunday School every weekend at his church and teaches his own specific story of salvation and has the children learn spiritual songs.



As a result of the plane crash that killed his father and two of his brothers, the Federal Aviation Administration established the "sterile cockpit" rule, which prohibits flight crews from engaging in any conversation or activities apart from their flying duties while the aircraft is below 10,000 feet.



As a result of an operation he had when he was young, he can fold his right ear inside out and can pop it out when he squints his eye.



Received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Galesburg, IL, in 2006.



His father was of seven-eighths Irish ancestry, with his other roots being English and German. His mother was of entirely Irish descent.



His siblings from oldest to youngest are: Jimmy, Eddie, Mary, Billy, Margo, Tommy, Jay, Lulu, Paul, and Peter. Stephen is the youngest of the eleven.



Often sings and dances in television performances. He has said in interviews that he studied voice and ballet in college.





In January 2008 he began a campaign on his show to have a portrait of his character hung in the "Treasures of American History" exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC (pieces shown in that exhibit included a top hat worn by' Abraham Lincoln , an original light bulb made by Thomas A. Edison , a Greensboro (NC) lunch counter that was the scene of a seminal civil rights sit-in, Lewis and Clark's compass, and Kermit the Frog). When the National Museum of American History refused the portrait, Colbert next offered it to the National Portrait Gallery (also a Smithsonian museum), which accepted it on a temporary basis and hung it between the bathrooms adjacent to the Hall of Presidents. After the portrait's term at the National Portrait Gallery was up, the National Museum of American History did agree to hang the portrait--next to a Dumbo car from the original Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride at Disneyland.



His older sister, Elizabeth Colbert Busch (aka Lulu), is the 2014 South Carolina Democratic congressional candidate. Her Republican opponent will be Gov. Mark Sanford [April 2013].



In the 1980s he attended Chicago's Northwestern University's theater & speech class with friend David Schwimmer

Was number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. [October 2007].



A new George Mason University study found that he had made 337 jokes about President Trump's first 100 days in office.[May 2017].



Was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People.[2006].





Received the final call back audition for SNL with Tracy Morgan in 1996.



While still a struggling actress, Jennifer Garner once babysat for Stephen and wife Evelyn's baby girl after they'd become acquainted playing cameo roles on Spin City: The Competition (1996).

His surname is actually pronounced how it looks, "col burt", but he has preferred "cole-bear" since college since his family is part French and it sounds more sophisticated to his family.



He was nominated for the 2017 New Jersey Hall of Fame in the Performing Arts category.



Worked as a waiter for 5 years as a young man.





Is a big fan of author Flannery O'Connor , "The Enduring Chill" being his favorite of her books.

His father James was a immunologist.



Personal Quotes (41)



[on what he would like to ask former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean ] The media tries to portray you as an angry candidate. Doesn't that piss you off?



[To Howard Kurtz on CNN's Reliable Sources (1992) January 25, 2004] We have no desire to make anybody look like a blithering idiot, but we do love it when they do. Because we get it off the AP feed and, then, we don't have to write anything for the next five minutes. We can just roll the tape.

[Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City, UT), January 23, 2004] Since there's not more news than there used to be, but there's way more time, and more channels doing it all the time, so that analysis has become much more than news . . . They really have to fill and they go, "(Expletive), we'll just have analysis for the next three hours," because there's no more new on the story. And then . . . the first person with a semi-cogent thought, they go, "(Expletive), I'll say that, too." And then that analysis becomes accepted dogma because analysis is the bulk of what you're getting. You're not really getting any more news.





[The Union Leader (Manchester NH, January 25, 2004, when asked why people should watch The Daily Show (1996)] You shouldn't listen to us at all if you're looking for information. We don't take ourselves seriously on any level; we're just comedians . . . I'm a huge news junkie. I love what the news does. And we're a shadow, a reflection, of what's happening in the real news.



[on his mock "crusade" against the Associated Press regarding his claim that coined the word "truthiness"] It's a sin of omission, is what it is. You're not giving people the whole story about truthiness. It's like [ William Shakespeare ] still being alive and not asking him what "Hamlet" is about.

The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all. You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.



[about the Washington press corps] But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions, he's the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction.



[on his creativity] I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and--like all teenagers--I dabbled in poetry.



[on writing] I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.





[stating that the best moment in the 2004 campaign for Democratic presidential nominee was Howard Dean 's post-Iowa speech] Because clearly everybody was captivated by it. I think that's an argument why he should be President, because he can capture everyone's attention. Listen, George W. Bush was a cheerleader. I'm sure he screamed like that when he was at Yale, and I don't see why that disqualifies someone from being President. But George Bush did it in a human pyramid.



I was never interested in political comedy: " Ted Kennedy 's hitting the bottle again!'" Jon Stewart taught me how to do it so it would be smart. He encouraged everyone to have a point of view. There had to be a thought behind every joke.



[Remembering the 2000 presidential election recount] We all had such blue balls from the jokes we wanted to do when Al Gore eventually conceded. And the night it happened, here we were doing them. I turned to Jon Stewart and said, "This is the most fun job on TV right now".

Citizens United said that transparency would be the disinfectant, but (c)(4)'s are warm, wet, moist incubators. There is no disinfectant.



My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.



[In his junior year in high school]: I was probably still Colbert to a lot of people. But in my mind I was coal-BARE."



The trouble with the jokes is that once they're written, I know how they're supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I'm more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.



As executive producer of this show, I get to ask my character to do whatever I want.



My character is a patriot, and he believes that the Olympics are war. It's a way to prove who's got the best country. Only nobody gets hurt.



My character isn't ironically detached, he's ironically a-ttached; things are important to him.





[In 2009] I know what you're thinking: "Isn't the Iraq War over?" That's what I thought, too. I hadn't seen it in the media for a while, and when I don't see something, I assume it's vanished forever, like in that terrifying game "Peekaboo". We stopped seeing much coverage of the Iraq War back in September when the economy tanked, and I just figured the insurgents were wiped out because they were heavily invested in Lehman Brothers. Turns out there are still 135,000 troops in Iraq, which I don't understand because we've already won the war. And we've won it so many times. We should win something for the number of times we've won it. We eliminated the weapons of mass destruction by having them not exist. We took out Saddam Hussein --or a really convincing and committed Saddam Hussein double. We helped write the Iraqi Constitution and clearly gave Iraqis the right to bear a lot of arms. And by August of next year we'll withdraw every single one of our troops, leaving behind only memories and 50,000 troops. But despite our continued victories, Americans have many lingering questions about Iraq. For example: where is Iraq? My guess is somewhere near Paraguay.

I don't accept the status quo. I do accept Visa, MasterCard, or American Express.



Well, this is the planet we live on, so . . .





[as new host on the premiere of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015), September 8, 2015] With this show I begin the search for the real Stephen Colbert. I just hope I don't find him on Ashley Madison.

[jokingly]I'd like to think I'm the Pope of late night television.



[on his show, May 3, 2017] If you saw my monologue Monday, you know that I was a little upset at Donald Trump for insulting a friend of mine. So at the end of that monologue I had a few choice insults for the president in return. I don't regret that. He, I believe, can take care of himself. I have jokes; he has the launch pads. So it's a fair fight.



Now, if you saw my monologue Monday, you know that I was a little upset at Donald Trump for insulting a friend of mine. So at the end of that monologue I had a few choice insults for the president in return. I don't regret that. He, I believe, can take care of himself. I have jokes; he has the launch codes. So, it's a fair fight.



Sir, you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine. You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign language gorilla that got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin's c--k holster.



[on the backlash he received for his monologue on April 30, 2017]So while I would do it again, I would change a few words that were cruder than they needed to be," he says. "I'm not going to repeat the phrase, but I just want to say for the record, life is short, and anyone who expresses their love for another person, in their own way, is to me, an American hero. I think we can all agree on that. I hope even the president and I can agree on that. Nothing else. But, that.



Mr. Trump, there is a lot you don't understand. But I never thought one of those things would be show business! Don't you know, I have been trying for a year to get you to say my name!? And you were very restrained. Admirably restrained. But now, you did it. I won



Since all of my success is clearly based on talking about you, if you really want to take me down, there's an obvious way. Resign



[Presenting the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical in 2017] It's been a great year for revivals in general, especially that one they revived down in Washington DC. It started off Broadway in the '80s - way off Broadway, over on Fifth Avenue - huge production values, couple problems: main character is totally unbelievable! And the hair and make-up! Yeesh! No! This DC production's supposed to have a four-year run, but reviews have *not* been kind. Could close early.





[after Deadline Hollywood called Donald Trump 's attack on Mika Brzezinski a "new low"] No! It's the same low! We're at a cruising altitude of, like, the bottom of the Marianas Trench right now! There are giant squid looking down at America!

George Church once stopped me from eating 20 million copies of his book 'Regenisis'. The fact that it was possible for me to do that is a testament to his genius. He had transmitted all the information in the book, including pictures, into the A-T-G-C code of DNA and placed 20 million copies of it in a tiny spot on a scrap of paper. It was a powerful demonstration of both the complexity and capacity of the genome he has dedicated his life to studying. As a biological engineer, Dr. Church has been accused of 'playing God', an accusation abetted by his beard of biblical proportions. But to me, George seems less like God and more like a cross between Darwin and Santa.



[on 'The Late Show, September 2017] Repealing DACA in order to MAGA is a load of CACA.





[after Donald Trump publicly attacked "the guy on CBS" for having "no talent"] Hey Mr. President, I will not stand here and let you talk that way about James Corden!



[on President Donald Trump 's "chopper talks" on the White House lawn] He should just stand in front of a margarita maker, because it's the same noise, and at least there'd be a cocktail at the end of it.

A no-deal Brexit would be an economic nightmare and "lead to food and medicine shortages in Britain". That is horrible! Not only will they be without medicine, they're going to have to start eating British food! Either way, there's going to be a lot of spotted dick going around.



[imitating Nancy Pelosi] I'm concerned about the President because he is, shall we say, twenty pounds of pudding in a ten pound sack.

