AVC: Did that sort of lead you toward acting?
SC: No, my mom kind of led me toward acting. She wanted to be an actress when she was younger. That made me interested in it when I was a kid, because she and I are very close.
AVC: And then you studied theater at Northwestern?
SC: I did, yes.
AVC: What was that like?
SC: I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that. Very regimented curriculum, and a 19th-century emphasis on rhetoric and grammar—and all male. And very conservative. Then I transferred to finish up at the Northwestern School Of Speech, where it was guys and girls on the same floor in my dorm, a quarter of my class was gay, and I was calling my teacher not "Professor," but "Ann," and she was coming over and partying at my apartment and crashing on the couch. It was a completely different experience.
AVC: How did you become involved with Second City?
SC: When I was an undergrad, I met this guy named Del Close, who was sort of a godfather of comedy in Chicago, and a lot of people had sort of a guru relationship with him, which I did not have. I never got to know him well enough. But he and a woman named Charna Halpern were starting the ImprovOlympic, and at the time, it was a competitive, freeform, one-act, long-form improvisation. And they were looking for colleges to do competitions at their theater, the Annoyance Theater by the Belmont el stop in Chicago. And a friend of mine said, "We should go down and check this out," and he already knew something about Del and Charna. And I went and saw it once and was stunned by how much I wanted to go do it. We formed a team—we would go down on Tuesday nights and perform for audiences at the cabaret, and at the same time, I was taking more of a formal theater training. And when I got out of college, I wasn't gonna do Second City, because those Annoyance people looked down on Second City because they thought it wasn't pure improv—there was a slightly snobby, mystical quality to the Annoyance people, the ImprovOlympic people.
But I needed a job when I got out of college, and a friend of mine was box-office manager at Second City, and she said, "Well, just come answer phones." And then I found out classes were free if you work there, and I wanted to do something other than try to go get an acting job… I was so afraid of not being hired. And I found out that I really liked the people who worked there, that they were really trying hard to do something new and interesting. The form there was a little ossified, but it wasn't for lack of trying. It was just sort of like there was an inertia. I met some wonderful people, and it was a happy accident. I hadn't intended to end up there. I meant to be a serious actor with a beard who wore a lot of black and wanted to share his misery with you.
AVC: Were you drawn to Second City's history?
SC: Nope. I knew nothing about Second City. I liked comedy as a kid. When I was a kid, I'd go to sleep to, like, Bill Cosby albums every night. I'd listen to Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow… Right!, and Wonderfulness, which are two of his most famous albums. Then the next night, I'd flip them over, 'cause it was the old stackable turntable. I loved George Carlin and Dean Martin. I was one of those kids who had every comedy album. But I didn't know anything about Second City at all.
AVC: Was your time at Second City good training for the rest of your career?
SC: Absolutely. Improvisation in general is good, and improvising material into themes, turning the material into something codified and repeatable, taught me scenic structure and dramatic gambits that work and things that are appealing both as a performer and an audience member, like you know, what does "want" really mean in a scene, and how do you achieve your want, and how is that expressed, and how do you achieve closure? Those are all things that I learned after just doing the same scenes over and over and over again over the years, with my own ability to change. Creativeness, and also taking things from improvisation into those things, originally because you learned what had to go and what had to stay, and you learned it in front of a live audience. It was a great education about what I was able to do and what audiences enjoyed, and the limits of self-indulgence, and the need to please and how you balance those. I found out what my strengths were.
AVC: What were they?
SC: I think one of my strengths was my ability to serve other people's ideas. I'm proud of my ability to understand what somebody else is trying to do and help them achieve it, because part of the aesthetic of improvisation is service. We don't lead, we only follow. You never say no. Serve the servant, follow the follower. And that's very valuable in your life, as well as very valuable in your work. I'm damn proud of my ability to help other people achieve their ideas. The weakness I learned about is that I get locked into the high-status game—the teacher, the doctor, the lawyer.
AVC: You were Steve Carell's understudy?
SC: Understudy at Second City doesn't mean what it means elsewhere. When he was out of town, they put me in. But, yeah, that's fine, I'm honored to be his understudy. My first gig on Mainstage, which is the main theater there, was going in for him. He was a great guy whose material was fun to do, and I was happy to pretend that I had written it.
AVC: Did you guys hit it off immediately?
SC: Steve's a very pleasant guy, but he's very private. I can't say that we ever hung out. He's an incredible guy to perform with. I have amazing respect. He always gives absolutely everything he has. I've never seen him phone anything in. And he'll try anything. They needed somebody at The Daily Show, and I said, "You guys should hire this guy named Steve Carell, there's nothing he can't make funny." It startles me how funny he can make things.
AVC: You were a correspondent before and after the Jon Stewart era of The Daily Show. How did the show change after Stewart took over?
SC: It turned from local news, summer kicker stories, celebrity jokes, to something with more of a political point of view. Jon has a political point of view. He wanted us to have a political point of view, and for the most part, I found that I had a stronger one than I had imagined. Before Jon got to The Daily Show, I'd kept myself from having a public point of view. Because I didn't enjoy political humor until I started working on it with Jon.
AVC: Even Mark Russell?
SC: I liked Mark Russell when I was a kid, 'cause so much of it seemed very easy to me—Ted Kennedy jokes, Ted Kennedy drinking jokes, Ted Kennedy fat jokes, or Ted Kennedy womanizing jokes. Most of them seemed flippant, you know, like somebody saying, "Ted Kennedy—enough said." That's not really a joke there, that's just the attitude of a joke. A lot of that passed for political humor, I felt. The Smothers Brothers kind of did it, but that was before my time. People like Mort Sahl…
AVC: George Carlin?
SC: I would say Carlin's not really a political guy. He's very interested in language and is very interested in the way people behave, and social satire, but I wouldn't call him political.
AVC: It kind of depends on your definition of "politics" and "political."
SC: Dealing with what politicians do and specifically dealing with what's happening currently in government is how I would [define] it. And that's about human behavior and the way we deal with each other in political ways. But I mean specifically things about what's happening in government, and what's happening in our name. There isn't a lot of that. Saturday Night Live is very influential, clearly. Weekend Update.
AVC: The Daily Show is a lot more hard-hitting in its satire than Weekend Update ever was.
SC: It's stylistically very different.
AVC: Of all the pieces you've done for The Daily Show, what were your most and least favorite?
SC: Remind me what The Daily Show is again?
AVC: It was a show you were very funny on for about eight years.
SC: The stuff we did in Boston for the 2004 [Democratic] convention was my favorite stuff we've done. The last night of the convention, I had come back from shooting all day, with one of the producers, who's a great guy and used to work at 60 Minutes, and we were kind of beat. We flopped down in our offices at Boston University where we were working. And we had four passes for Kerry's acceptance speech that night, and Jim and I just said, "Well, give 'em to us, we'll do something." And we got a camera crew. At first, they wouldn't let us in because there were too many people in the hall. There were 20,000 seats, and I think they gave out 40,000 tickets, and everyone came. We couldn't stand still at any point inside, or the fire marshals would kick you out. You literally had to keep moving at all times if you weren't sitting. So we shot for the next five hours, and we didn't stand still for five hours. So I had to do everything moving at all times, and it was the worst night of shooting we've ever done, and yet something came out of it. And we turned it around in 24 hours, and it probably was the thing I was most proud of at the show. That was both the worst and the best right there.
AVC: Jon Stewart recently said he sees The Colbert Report as sort of a 30-minute Daily Show segment. Do you see it as an extension of The Daily Show?
SC: I sort of see The Daily Show as a 30-minute preamble. It's like an appetizer before you get to the main course.
AVC: Do you think the sensibility is pretty much the same?
SC: Absolutely. This is a direct extension of the work they did on The Daily Show, and it plays very much the same game as my character, who is a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot.
AVC: It seems like it's much more an overt parody of O'Reilly.
SC: Right, sure, O'Reilly, Hannity, there's a little bit of Lou Dobbs, where he rides the same story over and over again, the attention to sartorial detail like Anderson Cooper, absolutely bullheaded holding onto an idea, no matter how shallowly considered, like Hannity, and almost a physical aggressiveness that O'Reilly has. O'Reilly's the easiest one to reference, because he's the most popular. He's the one everyone's gonna understand. And he also does it best. He's an incredibly aggressive performer. We try to include a little bit of all of them.
AVC: On The Daily Show, you're part of an ensemble, and here, you're the whole show. Is that exhausting?
SC: No, it's not like waiting in a diner. It would be more sustainable. I just don't know if I can do 165 more shows this year that way.
AVC: You voice a lot of animated characters. Which one do you identify with the most?
SC: Probably Phil Ken Sebben [of Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law]. He's a high-status person who's actually kind of a fraud. Very fearful and insecure and vengeful to anyone who will question his authority. It's much like working for me.
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