The mystery of "Himmmm"

[Addendum to the earlier note--]

Firstly, I would like to say, God bless the obsessive stans of the world. They save me from having to track down each and every individual goddamned piece of media one by one when I go on a tare. There is no project so obscure that they cannot give me enough information to find some chunk of it somewhere on the internet. I can't honestly recommend Exit 57 for entertainment value (it's recognizably in Colbert/Dinello/Sedaris' style, but, uh, they got better) but if you ever wanted to know how they worked their way up to Strangers With Candy, that'll definitely tell you.

The down side to this is that their laser focus sometimes gets a little too narrow. The hive mind tends to assume that anyone who's found their way down the rabbit hole already knows what's going on, or that nobody ever needs a reason for the "smexy", and they can edit things down to just the "good bits". This is aggravating if you're actually trying to find documentation or build an analysis of something. Which, as I have no good way to turn my brain off, is generally what I'm doing.

So it's driving me a little bit batty that I cannot for the life of me find the context for these two clips. 

As previously mentioned, none of that is at all weird for Colbert. If it's a joke, it's an old one; he spent a far larger percentage of Exit 57 making out with Paul Dinello than I expected (which, since it aired in 1995, was zero). If he's making some sort of point, well, he's got two good friends out on that stage, and Steve Carell ain't all that touchy-feely. It's not especially OOC for Stewart either, albeit that bit seems to be pretty Colbert-specific -- there's about 400% more punching involved when he's horsing around with Denis Leary. 

The staging is consistent with other interviews the cast and writers of The Daily Show have done for the Paley Center for Media Studies, presumably the New York campus, but the wardrobe doesn't match any of the clips the Paley Center have themselves released on YouTube. The wardrobe and staging doesn't match up between the clips either, so whatever the hell was going on there, it apparently happened twice. There's no solid date on the footage, but the leather jacket Stewart's wearing retired from public appearances sometime in the mid-Aughties.

The Paley events are moderated audience Q&A, so probably it was in response to something from the crowd. Without audio or the lead up I'll be damned if I know what. The moderator doesn't seem to react much, but that just means she's been around this lot for more than like five minutes.

As a side note, it is absolutely hilarious that Colbert decides to circle around and politely cross upstage of all the chairs, while Stewart just lunges across the stage, tables be damned. The two main breeds of actor in a nutshell.