Grief Is the Wolf at Your Door

Stephen Colbert on family, comedy as coping mechanism, and the things we cling to when the people we love disappear.

I decided to share this excerpt from my Stephen Colbert Playboy interview for two reasons.

One, tonight is Christmas Eve, and that makes me think of The Second City, the Chicago comedy club where I worked for the entirety of the ‘90s, doing everything from selling tickets to teaching comedy writing. The annual staff Christmas parties were downright bacchanalian. I remember at least one where several employees (myself included) used the Xerox machine to take selfies of our nutsacks, which we then randomly passed out to fellow staffers. (It was a different time, back with scrotal Xeroxes were still considered “charming.”) 

Stephen Colbert was a regular in the cast when I first arrived in the early ‘90s, and at my inaugural staff Christmas soirée, he picked my name in the all-company Secret Santa. He’d heard that I was an aspiring writer, so he reached out to friends who worked at the “special collections” section of the downtown library—because of course Stephen Colbert was on a first-name basis with librarians—and got a copy of an unpublished J.D. Salinger short story. It was a stunningly considerate gift, especially when pretty much everyone else on the theater’s staff was exchanging stupid Secret Santa gifts like VHS copies of Bosom Buddies and weed.

On every holiday season since, when I’m picking out gifts for loved ones, I’ll invariably think, Am I trying as hard as Stephen Colbert?

Secondly, my conversation with Colbert for Playboy—which happened at his studio office in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen—was, not unlike his Secret Santa gift, more thoughtful than I’d anticipated. It was 2012 and he was playing a far-right, Rush Limbaugh-esque version of himself on Comedy Central, still years away from taking the reins at The Late Show. He rarely gave interviews out of character. But for whatever reason, we talked like two human beings. I reminded him about the Secret Santa gift, and though we hadn’t talked since at least 1992, he remembered every detail, including the extensive notes he’d written in the margins.

We talked about many things, but the parts I still remember involved family and death and grieving, which are always close to my mind around Christmas. My dad died in December, so the season is always tinged with a Charlie Brown Christmas melancholy for me. And I think it’s the same for a lot of people, whether you’ve just lost someone and you’re trying to make it through your first Christmas without them, or they’ve been gone years, decades even, but the wound still feels fresh and raw this time of year.

Christmas can suck. But every year, much like I try to give gifts with the same care that Colbert did to some box office kid he barely knew, I also try to grieve like him. I usually come up short, but not for lack of trying. He remains, after all these years, a high water mark.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. Especially if you’re grieving and pretending to be okay.