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| Stephen Colbert, offering a prayer to the Good Book (FW). |
Last week, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS did a segment roasting the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, Texas (yes, our group, the one this very blog is about) and he even quoted my words from the recent NPR article about the group. That really happened. Colbert quoted me, on national television, talking about Finnegans Wake.
Watch the clip below (starting at 3:55):
There are layers to the joke here because Stephen Colbert, who is a proud descendant of Irish immigrants, is no lightweight Joycean, in fact, he has been performing passages from Ulysses at Bloomsday events for decades.
While he's making fun of Joyce's craziest book, he knows of what he speaks, and so he is either in on the joke and making fun of himself too, or, it could be this is Colbert's way of staking his claim that Ulysses is the superior of Joyce's major novels. Maybe a bit of both.
Either way it's amazing that Colbert was roasting our Finnegans Wake reading group on TV. Just to even see the book cover of Finnegans Wake appear on television is extremely cool! They just awakened millions of new Finnegans, gave birth to new HCEs and ALPs. Here Comes Everybody.
An added dimension to the joke is that the other subjects Colbert talks about in the segment, like vagina-scented candles, astrology, poop jokes, frauds, pyramids, Indiana Jones, hoarding, etc all of that is essentially akin to what's encountered in reading Finnegans Wake.
What's also a funny connection for me is I once encountered Stephen Colbert in person. True story: I was on a tour of the Tower of London on Thanksgiving Day back in 2008 and I happened to be on the same tour with Stephen Colbert and his family. I recognized him and he noticed that but I played it cool. All these years later, and he was quoting me on his tv show.
I've been a fan of Colbert's comedy since way back when he was a regular on the show Strangers with Candy with Amy Sedaris. I enjoyed his time on the Daily Show, and of course his long-running satirical show The Colbert Report was iconic. I find myself cracking up any time I think of the titles of some of his ridiculous books, like I Am America (And So Can You!) (2007) and the prescient America Again: Re-becoming The Greatness We Never Weren't (2012).
A bit more about his Joycean bonafides, from a Kirkus Reviews article:
Colbert is a longtime admirer of Joyce. When he published his 2012 children’s book I Am a Pole (And So Can You!), he arranged to have the manuscript displayed next to the Ulysses manuscript at the Rosenbach [museum in Philadelphia].And in March, he recalled how Joyce’s masterpiece landed him in trouble during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics at the Ireland House. “There was a stage up there with a traditional band playing and they had a football game on,” Colbert said. “I went upstage and I said, ‘Who wants to celebrate Irish culture!’ And I took out a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. There was a riot, I had to be hustled out by security.”
Back in 2022, on St. Patrick's Day, Colbert tweeted this:
Maybe one of these St. Patty's Days he'll get so drunk that he'll make it through all of Finnegans Wake and then I'll add him to The Pantheon of Finnegans Woke.
