Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

all colbert, all the time

The “truthiness teller” is popping up all over the place these days.

Stephen Colbert, host of Daily Show spin-off The Colbert Report, has been getting a ton of press lately, including a profile featured on the cover of this week’s issue of Newsweek. (And a super-cool photo by F. Scott Schafer, echoing one of the promo photos for the movie Good Night and Good Luck.)

Colbert also was interviewed for a feature in last week’s The Onion A.V. Club, where he offered a really interesting tidbit about the thought that went into the set design:

Status is always ripe for satire, status is always good for comedy. And they have the highest possible status�and that’s what we’ve tried to amplify with everything on the show. Everything on the show has my name on it, every bit of the set. One of the things I said to the set designer�who has done everything, I mean even Meet The Press, he does that level of news design�was “One of your inspirations should be [DaVinci’s painting] The Last Supper.” All the architecture of that room points at Jesus’ head, the entire room is a halo, and he doesn’t have a halo.” And I said, “On the set, I’d like the lines of the set to converge on my head.” And so if you look at the design, it all does, it all points at my head. And even radial lines on the floor, and on my podium, and watermarks in the images behind me, and all the vertices, are right behind my head. So there’s a sort of sun-god burst quality about the set around me. And I love that. That’s status.

We just try everything we can to pump up my status on the show. There are no televisions behind me, like the way [NBC Nightly News anchor] Brian Williams has, or even [Daily Show host] Jon [Stewart]. At certain angles, there are monitors behind Jon that have the world going on, which implies that that’s where the news is, and that’s where the information is, and the person in front of it is the conduit through which this information is given to you. But on my set, I said, “I don’t want anything behind me, because I am the sun. It all comes from me. I’m not channeling anything. I am the source.”