Stephen Colbert revealed why he tends to play “poorly informed” characters, including his Strangers With Candy character Charles “Chuck” Noblet, while celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Comedy Central series’ cancellation during the New York Comedy Festival on Saturday.
During a Q&A at the event, the cast was asked what their characters say about their shadow selves. “My shadow self is very much like Noblet in that, like, very self serious, doesn’t want anyone to know how frightened he is all the time; is willing to shut down anyone in order to win an argument,” he said of the high school history teacher. “Those are the things that my entire life I’ve had to battle against.”
Colbert went on to admit that his “character on The Colbert Report was very related” to Noblet and “they had a lot of similarities,” including being a “high status, poorly informed idiot.”
While Noblet was a high-strung teacher, the comedian’s fictionalized persona on The Colbert Report was a conservative pundit that was always up for a debate. Colbert was then asked why he tends to play characters with similar personality flaws, and he admitted it was “to name it so I don’t become that person.”
“I love really weak characters,” he said of Noblet earlier in the night. “He’s very buttoned up, very high-status. Very weak, very afraid. Totally unexamined. That’s what I loved about him, is that he would never push the lens on himself.”
Strangers With Candy premiered on Comedy Central in 1999 and was a spoof of the after-school specials of the 1970s and ’80s. The show followed 46-year-old Geraldine “Jerri” Antonia Blank (Amy Sedaris), who was a former drug addict returning to high school as a freshman. Throughout the series, Jerri acted as a guide of things not to do as a student at the school. In addition to Colbert’s role of Noblet, Paul Dinello starred as art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck. Colbert,Dinello and Sedaris created the series alongside Mitch Rouse, while the three stars also wrote the episodes.
The event, which was moderated by Kate McKinnon, paid tribute to the show’s cancellation 25 years after the third and final season aired in 2000. The cast recalled they were never notified that the show was officially cancelled, and they briefly picked up the story in the 2005 movie Strangers With Candy.
“We never got the final word,” Colbert said about the show’s cancellation, sharing that a TV upfront took place in the spring of 2000 in which Comedy Central revealed Strangers With Candy wasn’t “on the schedule.”
Colbert explained they asked for the network to confirm the show was canceled so they could write a final episode, though they were told “no decision has been made” about the fate of the show. “No one ever said, ‘You’re canceled.’ They just stopped sending the checks,” he added.
Dinello quipped that “they stopped re-filling our snack drawer” on set, and Sedaris jokingly added it was “bone dry.”
Another topic the group discussed was their eagerness to tell outlandish storylines that would leave viewers in shock. Early on in the conversation, McKinnon introduced a clip from a season one episode titled “Dreams on the Rocks.” Colbert then explained that in the episode, Jellineck was putting on a school production of A Raisin in the Sun in which “all the characters are cast by white students and the Black students are playing the refrigerator, the tree.”
“We shot that, cut it; before we could get it on the air, a school in Maine put on an all-white Raisin in the Sun,” he said about the play, which depicts a Black family’s experience in Chicago.
Despite their attempts to come up with outrageous storylines, Colbert said many plots they wrote often ended up happening in real life. He added, “It happened multiple times on the show that we couldn’t think of anything wrong enough to do [that] the world didn’t beat us to the punch.”