America's Anchors

"Stephen is a happy man,'' Karlin says. "He goes home to a lovely wife in New Jersey with a new dog and three beautiful children. He teaches Sunday school and knows his way around the kitchen. And then he has this deviously brilliant comedic mind."

Stewart, 43, is an intense Manhattan smarty-pants who has the style and air of a man perpetually slouching toward adulthood. He's contentedly married with two small kids, but he still casts himself as repressed and anti-social. Stewart, whose parents went through a difficult divorce when he was ten, grew up in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, where he said he was bullied as a rare Jewish kid in his neighborhood. "Jon is driven by the forces of guilt and shame and fear of being on the outside that gives Jews their comic angst,'' Karlin says. "He's self-trained in stand-up. He learned in the wretched comedy clubs of New York.''

The two satirists, interviewed together and separately, are so in sync they sometimes say the same word at the same time, play off each other's pauses or slip in a deft punch line for the other. Stewart cracks up at every riff Colbert does. Colbert, his writers say, still has a bit of hero worship for Stewart, and, as a longtime little brother in his own big family, naturally falls into that role with Stewart.

Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the Odd Couple do not socialize outside the office. "In theory, I think Jon would be excellent company,'' Colbert says. "I just have nothing to back it up."

A fake news show, "The Daily Show," spawned a fake commentator, Colbert, who makes his own fake reality defending the fake reality of a real president, and has government officials on who know the joke but are still willing to be mocked by someone fake. Your shows are like mirrors within mirrors, using a cycle of fakery to get to the truth. You've tapped into a sense in society that nothing, from reality shows to Bushworld, is real anymore. Do you guys ever get confused by your hall of mirrors?

STEWART: I didn't know we were going to have to be high to do this interview.

COLBERT: I think we see it less as a hall of mirrors and more as one of those slenderizing mirrors you can buy that you see in catalogs that make you feel good about yourself before you go out the door.

Jon, you're from stand-up. And Stephen, your background is improv. How does that affect how you approach your work?

STEWART: On our show, the last thing I think about is performing. It's all about the managing, editing and moving toward showtime. Stephen is rendering a character in real time. Typically, he's improvising with people who don't know they're in an improv scene.

COLBERT: While my character's history may not be always perfectly consistent, if you, like, are Web-crazy, and there are a few of them out there, you go to Wikipedia. There's my bio and there's my character's bio, and then there's my character's history, which is slightly different than my character's bio.

It's got a lot of levels. My head hurts sometimes watching "The Colbert Report."

COLBERT: Then we've succeeded. We want people to be in pain and confused. I make up facts left and right. Liberals will come on the show and say, "Well, conservatives want this to be a theocracy." And I'll say, "Well, why not, the Founding Fathers were all fundamentalist Christians." And they'll say, "No, they weren't." I say, "Yes, they were. And, ladies and gentlemen, if I'm wrong I will eat your encyclopedias." And the person folds, 'cause they don't realize I have no problem making things up, because I have no credibility to lose.

I heard, Stephen, that you were concerned at the beginning that it would be hard to stay in character.

COLBERT: We had many conversations about this. I said, "I don't want to be an asshole." And Jon said . . .

STEWART: That you're not an asshole. It's one thing for an asshole to play an asshole. But your basic decency can't be hidden.

Actually, that's what [Fox News chairman] Roger Ailes says, that the camera picks up who you are.

STEWART: Oh, then I would think he would hire more inherently decent people. He doesn't have the ability to recognize that in people.

Stephen, do people come up to you in the supermarket and address you as though you are your character?

COLBERT: People generally don't. I come from a fairly conservative place, Charleston, South Carolina, and people have come up to me there and said, "Well, now I like what you do." They had a little trouble with our liberal, lefty bent over at The Daily Show. But now they're [in Southern accent] "Good fucking A, man, good for you!" And I'm like, "Well, I'm not sure. . . .''