A friend of mine was tolerating my drunken fangirling last weekend, patiently agreeing that yes, it is the cutest thing ever when Stephen Colbert turns around to hit on his off-camera wife every time he fucks up a line in his monologue. And yeah, I keep watching that because he's being comfortingly sane/angry right now, but also because it feels like representation, in a weird sort of way.
Colbert is, in many respects, what a lot of people would think of as the quintessential American: A straight, white, Christian man, married with kids, on a lifelong career path that has earned him substantial material wealth. Left to his own devices, he dresses like the dadliest dad who ever dadded. He's expressed some ambivalence about the knowledge that at least some of his media clout comes from this. On the one hand, he is perhaps not the best person to speak to the lived experience of institutional disadvantage; on the other, there are a lot of straight white Christian men in America who just don't feel the need to listen to anyone who isn't a straight white Christian man in America, and there's a lot he can do to redirect that.
But he's also just generally unconventional. Not just off-the-wall comedy. Like, personally not what you would expect from someone who teaches Sunday school, and looks more and more like Ward Cleaver's goofy little brother with every passing year.
About six months into his Late Show gig, the guests started getting it into their heads that the host could be kissed. I'm a little surprised it took them that long; I'm not at all surprised that it was started by Helen Mirren, always a lady with a fine sense of shenanigans. Sally Field went for it with more gusto the next day. Jeff Daniels managed to be more restrained.
Colbert generally ignores it when he accidentally touches off a tempest in a Twitter feed, but this time he opted to make a few remarks about what he termed "an eventful week for my face". In them, he makes it very clear that he did check in with his wife, and he is Definitely Allowed To Do That. He personally thought everything was fine, and in fact was going to take the opportunity to be smug, because holy shit you guys, Helen Mirren.
I will note that "she's cool with it" here does not appear to be a euphemism for "I fucked up and she forgave me". It means "she says it's fine if I make out with Spider-Man in front of a live studio audience". I expect he did actually double check, because that's what a reasonable adult would do, but I also expect that they hashed this out in the general case like thirty years ago. One, Colbert has been kissing his friends, on the lips or otherwise, for as long as I can find him on video. Sometimes for the sake of a joke, sometimes to make a point, and sometimes because they've just won an Emmy and he feels like it. And two, Mirren got a second kiss at the end of that interview, one that he started. Which seems like a thing he wouldn't have done if he were already afraid he'd be sleeping on the couch that night.
Colbert has not said a word about it since. And no one has asked him.
Another thing nobody ever mentions is how Colbert is one of the few straight male actors whom I've ever seen pull off a transparent closet joke without being derogatory. He's actually done it twice, as long-running gags on two separate series: The "secret gay affair" variant playing opposite Paul Dinello on Strangers With Candy, and the "strangely romantic-looking friendship" one with Jon Stewart on The Colbert Report (spilling over onto The Daily Show, The Late Show, and at this point probably his actual life). There's a lot about the specific writing and general sensibilities of both shows that contributes to that, but much of what sells it is that Colbert looks completely, genuinely comfortable with those performances. I imagine it helped that both times he was working with someone he was close to in real life, but also he just seems to be fine with sharing personal space in a way that straight men are typically not.
Colbert can get pretty grabby-hands with his favorite people off stage, too. He's shared various snapshots from Second City over the years. There's a bunch in some the "Stephen Has A Story" segments from LSSC. If there's another human being in the photo with him, he's probably trying to cuddle them. It's continued through the decades. I'm pretty sure when he does a bit with Jon Stewart the stage crew just puts down one spike for the both of them. They made it maybe a year, year and a half into doing The Daily Show together before they were poking at each other and stealing props right out of the other one's bin behind the desk. Colbert is so un-self-conscious about it that most people treat it as invisible.
I couldn't say for sure when he decided that he was free to loll all over people he liked, but my bet is probably at Second City, where he credits Dinello and Amy Sedaris with breaking him of an unfortunate tendency to take himself, and everything else, way too seriously. I don't know what he was like prior, because touring with Second City is essentially when his public career started. Nothing before that is really any of my business; hunting anything down would make me feel damned creepy.
And, again, nobody has ever asked him. He does seem to be aware that he is not always adhering to social expectation here, but also that if he acts casual, everyone else will just assume it's not really a thing. On the odd occasion when Colbert does feel like making a point about other men not having cooties, he has to bring it up himself.
None of the above is beyond-the-pale weird, but it's the kind of thing that you wouldn't normally guess of a devoutly-religious middle-aged straight dude. A lot of it is stuff that men are still under a lot of pressure not to do, like show feelings that aren't pride or rage, or be physically affectionate with people who aren't your partner/children. It's more suggestive of someone who believes that the relationships in your life -- with your friends, your family, your society, and even your God -- are very much what you say they are, and not what other people say they should be.
The greatest significance of this, I think, is not necessarily that he's been behaving this way for as long as he's been a public performer, or even that he's behaving this way at this particular point in human history. It's that he's behaving this way at this particular point in his life.
Colbert is in his mid~late 50s. From the point of view of someone in their late teens to early twenties, still trying to figure out how the fuck humans are supposed to work, he's the Old Guy. Stuff the Old Guy does isn't radical innovation. It's the boring standard. And the boring standard that Colbert is setting is that negotiating something that works and makes you happy is more important than being "normal" or "respectable". You communicate with your spouse like you're both functional adults. You tell the people you love that you love them and don't think twice about who can hear you.
These are things I've been ranting about for most of my life. People don't do them enough. Judging from the advice columns of the world, emotional negotiation is a skill very few people have bothered to develop. I do kind of wish someone would ask Colbert about it directly, because I'm curious, and talking about it is always beneficial, but that's secondary. I really just like seeing someone else demonstrate it in public.
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