SkaroffBlog

It’s the morning after, and the show has now aired, but still, I think a reckoning is warranted.

Yesterday afternoon a friend offered me a ticket to the final taping of The Colbert Report in Philadelphia. It was the stunning conclusion of their “Dorito’s Spicy Sweet Pennsylvania Primary Coverage From Chili-Delphia – The City of Brotherly Crunch!” It would be quite an evening.

We queued up on Walnut Street, outside of Penn’s Annenberg Center to first wait in line for half an hour, and then pack the lobby of the Zellerbach Theater for at least another hour. This was after being scanned and patted down by the Secret Service. This time, I was smart enough to leave home the wrench that the Secret Service had taken from me while entering the Obama rally at the Convention Center last week. Finally, the velvet rope parted and we hurried down to grab seats in the third row, perhaps 20 feet from the giant C that forms Stephen’s anchor desk.

Now despite the fact that after fast-forwarding through the commercials, the Colbert Report is only barely more than 20 minutes, it takes quite a bit more than that to record an entire show, especially in a different theater and with a much larger production than normal. For this was no standard Report.

After learning of Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the toaster, Stephen began to introduce the segment on last night’s debate. Sadly his giant screen failed and who else showed up to fix it, but Sen. Hillary Clinton. She made a couple of jokes about how to fix it (none of which really landed in my opinion) before telling Stephen to call her any time he needed help. Her segment was actually edited down when broadcast to go a bit smoother.

With the screen fixed, next came a favorite of mine, Congressman Pat Murphy, a local boy, Iraq vet, and friend of DoubleSpeak. He mostly talked about Sen. Obama and the war in Iraq in his inimitable Philly accent. If you watch the clip below, you’ll see me right in the aisle reaching for Stephen’s hand during the segment intro in the bottom left of the screen.

The third act was even more of a surprise: John Edwards. He appeared on stage to a standing ovation and proceeded to take Colbert’s place with his version of the Word, the Ed-Words. Mostly jokes about jet skiis and two Americas. Though I never considered myself an Edwards supporter, I was somewhat sad to see him leave the race. His contributions in terms of pushing the debate to the left and focusing on important issues of health care and the environment were crucial to forming the agenda of the party in this cycle. In the midst of the joking, he still managed to hit on his issues, so crucial to the newly discovered “white male vote.”

And that I figured, was that. All that was left was a final thank you to Philly and a goodbye on the week. Except that as we waited for Act IV, a sound man came out and hooked up Stephen with an earpiece for a satellite hookup. Something big remained…Barack Obama himself. His segment was also not amazing (the satellite delay makes things tough) but concluded a pretty impressive show and week.

With the show over, Stephen threw Wrist Strong bracelets and spicy sweet Doritos into the crowd. Finally, he approached the edge of the stage and my hand touched Stephen’s hand. What a night.

All the clips after the jump:

Franklin and Toast:

HRC:

Pat Murphy:

John Edwards:

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 11:04 am and is tagged as Colbert, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.