Capitalism as Epic Rap Battle

Mises Daily: Friday, November 23, 2012 by Mike Reid from www.mises.org

Who would win in a rap battle, Adolf Hitler or Darth Vader? Maybe that question hasn't exactly been gnawing at you, but in the cutthroat emerging market of Internet entertainment, writers, actors, and producers innovate tirelessly to get your attention.
One of the strangest commercial successes to rise from this crucible is the Epic Rap Battles of History, a YouTube musical-comedy series that now has more than 1.8 million subscribers. That's a block of loyal fans that most TV stations would kill for.
Before hitting on success, the series creators, Lloyd Ahlquist and Peter Shukoff, each struggled for a decade in live comedy, doing cheap shows in cheap clubs anywhere they could. In 2010, Shukoff branched out into online videos, but few people even noticed his uninspired YouTube sketches and songs.
Finally, after a disappointing improvisational theater session in 2010, the two comics hit on an idea that consumers actually liked: the Epic Rap Battles of History.
Shukoff and Ahlquist made a couple of 2-minute rap-battle videos, and the viewers suddenly flocked to them in the millions. The advertisers followed. And fast as they could, the investors rolled in to support and improve the product with capital goods (like green-screen studios and closets full of wigs.)
Today, Shukoff and Ahlquist are the star talent in a booming new entertainment company; they've created 25 wildly successful epic rap battles of history; and they are making good money by doing what they love. That's the power of the market.

The Breakout Hit

The video that made them famous (it's now at 65 million views) begins with Ahlquist standing rigidly in brown coat and mustache, shrieking out,

I am Adolf Hitler!
Commander of ze Third Reich.
Little known fact:
Also dope on ze mic!

Everyone hates Hitler. And everyone loves a good Hitler parody. So making him declare that he is a master rapper ("dope on ze mic") is funny enough for the first 20 seconds.
But this is an epic rap "battle." Hitler needs an opponent. Who can be villainous enough for the job? Sure, there's Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin, but to the vast majority of history-illiterate viewers today, those mass-murdering criminals just aren't recognizable figures.
As much as he deserves it, a Joseph Stalin parody can't get a million hits on YouTube. In fact, of the top five YouTube videos for the search term "Stalin Parody," four are actually Hitler parodies that guest-star Stalin.
That leaves only one figure in all the stories of modern Western culture prominent and powerful and absolutely evil enough to match Hitler.
It is, of course, Darth Vader.
He appears in his glossy black robotic outfit against a rotating, Star Wars–themed background:

You can't rhyme against the dark side of the force.
Why even bother?
So many dudes been with your mom
Who even knows if I'm your father?

A Celebration of Pop Culture

This crude, reality-crashing battle between evil and evil is a brilliant use of our cultural moment.
In modern Western culture, decimated as it is by more than a century of coercive government schooling, Hitler and Lincoln and Napoleon all have about the same presence in most human minds as do Darth Vader and Chuck Norris and Hulk Hogan.
In fact, if you go through each of the 25 epic rap battles between various figures both historical and fictional, you'll see that the lyrics about politicians and warlords (Barack Obama, Genghis Khan) are usually much less detailed than the intricate inside jokes about pop-culture icons (Steve Jobs, Captain Kirk).
The mass of people have been turned off of history by its bland treatment in the schools. Instead, they've turned their attention to the details of invention and entertainment in the free market.

High-Octane Consumer Sovereignty

People want epic rap battles, so infrastructure has leapt up to support them. The first few battles, from fall 2010, have decidedly low production values. Vader's outfit is baggy. In a later video, Chuck Norris's beard looks like it's cut from a stiff old wig. And many of the early lyrics waver from satirical genius to irrelevant crudity.
But by the fifth video, Ahlquist and Shukoff got themselves a new partner, Maker Studios. Maker, starting with a $100,000 grant from YouTube in early 2011, is now YouTube's biggest production company. They manage a stable of artists with a total of more than 90 million subscribers. (And they've just signed that inscrutable mainstream rap mogul, Snoop Dogg.)
Maker has it all — producers, writers, video editors, makeup artists, and prop handlers. But where did these people come from? How did they know they should devote their day to improving the lyrics of a rap battle between, for instance, Sarah Palin and Lady Gaga?
It's easy. The profit signal summoned them all.
Advertisers see that these YouTubers can bring steady, loyal traffic, and so they're jumping at the chance to pay Maker Studios for these new, zany forms of art.
Unlike many older media companies, which have struggled to adapt to the Internet, Maker is run by people who understand the culture of YouTube inside out. Its founders include some of the earliest YouTube stars: Lisa Donovan and Shay Butler.
Maker's success is based on its intimate understanding of the medium. They know that what creates viewer loyalty in the new media is engagement. Viewers don't want to watch passively; they want to take part in a community project.
Every Epic Rap Battle ends with Shukoff shouting, "Who won? Who's next? You decide!" Viewers leave their suggestions in the comments, and Shukoff and Ahlquist promise that they create all the new battles from those suggestions. That sense of connection with the artists — that sense of involvement in a shared conversation — keeps their fans coming back again and again.
If some fan makes a suggestion, then he feels emotionally invested in the project: he's more likely to share the video on Facebook, Twitter, his own blog, etc. — if only to get people to see and support his own suggestion.
The old Hollywood corporations, monopolistic dodoes all, are falling behind on YouTube because they are built on one-way communication with viewers: Hollywood makes it. You watch it. And if you make a video parody of it, Hollywood reserves the right to sue you.[1]
But capitalism rewards the early adopters — entrepreneurs like the people at Maker. Capitalism gives strength to those who take risks, those who see new opportunities in social and technological conditions, and those who find ways to please the consumers faster and more fully.
The wild young upstarts threaten to overthrow the calcified old giants every day. Who wins? Who will be next? The consumers decide.

Working with What We've Got

The haphazard assembly of fictionalized factoids in each epic rap battle may seem deplorably vacuous. But, as Mises makes perfectly clear in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, it's not the fault of the free market that millions of people like profane rap battles between caricatures of pop stars. All the market does is satisfy those tastes.
If Exodus and The Iliad were still central parts of our culture, entertainment entrepreneurs like Shukoff and Ahlquist would be working out the lyrics for a battle between Moses and Achilles.
The truth is that the insatiable behemoth of public schooling has crowded out (or beaten down) the tellers of ancient stories in almost every society on the globe. Whole generations have lost their narrative foundation.
But culture abhors a vacuum. If you take our stories away from us in the schools, we'll just create new ones in the market. If you block us with intellectual-property laws one way, we'll find another.

$8.00 $5.00

We Austrians and libertarians might do well to take a page from gleeful pop-culture innovators like Shukoff and Ahlquist. Indeed, the biggest Austrian Internet sensation of all time is itself a rap battle — the one between Keynes and Hayek.
To keep popularizing our ideas more and more, we will need to keep pursuing media innovation. We need what those YouTube moguls call engagement.
So tell us in the comments: Who are the most exciting libertarians in the new media? Who are the young musicians and comics and artists changing the way we communicate about freedom? Who should we be subscribing to on YouTube right now?
Who's important? Who should we write about next? You decide!

Comment on this article.
Mike Reid is primus inter pares at Invisible Order, a libertarian publishing-solutions company. He also teaches anthropology at the University of Winnipeg. Send him mail. Follow him on Twitter. See Mike Reid's article archives.
You can subscribe to future articles by Mike Reid via this RSS feed.
Copyright © 2012 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided full credit is given.

Notes

[1] YouTube provides legal support on copyright to Maker Studios.

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And I Thought Mine Was Small.......

A Mind Dismembered

In search of the magical penis thieves

By Frank Bures from Harpers Magazine at www.harpers.org

No one is entirely sure when magical penis loss first came to Africa. One early incident was recounted by Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu, a psychiatrist, in a letter some years ago to the Transcultural Psychiatric Review. In 1975, while posted in Kaduna, in the north of Nigeria, Dr. Ilechukwu was sitting in his office when a policeman escorted in two men and asked for a medical assessment. One of the men had accused the other of making his penis disappear. This had caused a major disturbance in the street. As Ilechukwu tells it, the victim stared straight ahead during the examination, after which the doctor pronounced him normal. “Exclaiming,” Ilechukwu wrote, “the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.”
According to Ilechukwu, an epidemic of penis theft swept Nigeria between 1975 and 1977. Then there seemed to be a lull until 1990, when the stealing resurged. “Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets,” Ilechukwu wrote. “Women were also seen holding on to their breasts directly or discreetly, by crossing the hands across the chest. . . . Vigilance and anticipatory aggression were thought to be good prophylaxes. This led to further breakdown of law and order.” In a typical incident, someone would suddenly yell: Thief! My genitals are gone! Then a culprit would be identified, apprehended, and, often, killed.
During the past decade and a half, the thievery seems not to have abated. In April 2001, mobs in Nigeria lynched at least twelve suspected penis thieves. In November of that same year, there were at least five similar deaths in neighboring Benin. One survey counted fifty-six “separate cases of genital shrinking, disappearance, and snatching” in West Africa between 1997 and 2003, with at least thirty-six suspected penis thieves killed at the hands of angry mobs during that period. These incidents have been reported in local newspapers but are little known outside the region.
For years I followed this trend from afar. I had lived in East Africa, in Italy, in Thailand, and other places too, absorbing their languages, their histories, their minutiae. I had tried to piece together what it might be like not just to live in those places but really to be in them, to jump in and sink all the way to the bottom of the pool. But through these sporadic news stories, I was forced to contemplate a land more foreign than any I had ever seen, a place where one’s penis could be magically blinked away. I wanted to see for myself, but no magazine would send me. It was too much money, too far, and too strange. Finally, when my wife became pregnant, I realized that it might be my one last reckless chance to go, and so I shouldered the expenses myself and went.
On my first morning in the Mainland Hotel, a run-down place with falling ceiling tiles and broken locks, I awoke to a din, and I realized it was simply the city: the clatter of the 17 million people of Lagos. It was louder than any metropolis I had ever heard. My windows were closed, but it sounded as if they were wide open. For the next few days, I wandered around the city not quite sure where to begin. I went to bookstores and took motorcycle taxis and asked people I met, friends of friends, but without much insight or luck.
Eventually I found my way to Jankara Market, a collection of cramped stands under a patchwork of corrugated-tin sheets that protect the proffered branches, leaves, seeds, shells, skins, bones, skulls, and dead lizards and toads from the elements. All these items are held to contain properties that heal, help, or harm, depending on what one needs them to do. The market is better known for the even darker things one can buy. At Jankara, one can buy juju: magic. On my first trip to Jankara, to look around, I met a woman who loved me, she said, and wanted to marry me. When I told her I was already married, she threatened to bind me to her magically with two wooden figures so that I would not sleep at night until I saw her. But she said it with a glint in her eye, so I didn’t worry.
A few days later, I returned to Jankara to ask her some questions. As soon as I walked into the dark, covered grounds of the market, she saw me.
“Ah,” she said. “You have come back!”
“Yes,” I said.
“Sit here,” she said, and pointed to a bench. She sat down across from me. “What did you bring me?”
I showed her some fruit I had brought.
“Ah, very nice,” she said and started to eat, even though it was daytime in the middle of Ramadan and she was Muslim. “How is your wife?”
“She is good.”
“And what about your other wife?”
“Who is that?”
“‘Who is that?’” she said in mock surprise. “I think you know who that is. That is me.”
“That is nice,” I said. “But in America it’s not possible.”
A man came up to her and handed her a crumpled piece of paper with a list of ingredients on it. She peered at the list, then got up and went around collecting sticks and leaves and seeds and plants. She chopped them all up and put them in a bag. While she was doing this, the man sat next to me on a bench.
“Is that for you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “It makes you very strong.”
Then another man came up and put in his order. It was something for the appendix, he said. When he was gone, the woman sat down next to me.
“I have a question,” I said.
“Yes.”
“In my country, we don’t have juju.”
“Yes.”
“But I was reading in the paper about penis snatchers—”
“Ah,” she interrupted me. “Don’t listen to them. That is not true. If I touch your thing like this”—and here she touched my leg—“is your penis gone?”
“No,” I said, uneasily. “But what if I come to you and ask you for protection? Can you do it?”
“Yes, I can.”
“How much?”
“One thousand naira. Two thousand. Even up from there.” This was a large sum by Nigerian standards—more than $15.
“Do you have many people come and ask for this?”
“Yes,” she said in a low voice.
She looked around.
“Many.”
Nigeria was not the first site of mysterious genital disappearance. As with so many other things, its invention can be claimed by the Chinese. The first known reports of “genital retraction” date to around 300 b.c., when the mortal dangers of suo-yang, or “shrinking penis,” were briefly sketched in the Nei Ching, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic Text of Internal Medicine. Also in China, the first full description of the condition was recorded in 1835, in Pao Siaw-Ow’s collection of medical remedies, which describes suo-yang as a “ying type of fever” (meaning it arises from too much cold) and recommends that the patient get a little “heaty” yang for balance.
Fears of magical penis loss were not limited to the Orient. The Malleus Maleficarum, medieval Europeans’ primary guidebook to witches and their ways, warned that witches could cause one’s membrum virile to vanish, and indeed several chapters were dedicated to this topic. Likewise the Compendium Maleficarum warned that witches had many ways to affect one’s potency, the seventh of which included “a retraction, hiding or actual removal of the male genitals.” (This could be either a temporary or a permanent condition.) Even in the 1960s, there were reports of Italian migrant workers in Switzerland panicking over a loss of virility caused by witchcraft.
These fears, however, seem to have been largely isolated; mass panics over genital retraction were not recorded until 1874. This was the year that, on the island of Sulawesi, a certain Benjamin Matthes was compiling a dictionary of Buginese when he came across a strange term, lasa koro, which meant “shrinking of the penis,” a disease that Matthes said was not uncommon among the locals and “must be very dangerous.” Sporadic reports of koro, as it came to be known, recurred over the years, and during the late twentieth century the panics proliferated. In 1967, an epidemic of koro raced through Singapore, affecting some five hundred men. In 1976, in northern Thailand, at least two thousand people were afflicted with rokjoo, in which men and women complained that their genitals were being sucked into their bodies. In 1982, there were major koro epidemics in India and again in Thailand, while in 1984 and 1985, some five thousand Chinese villagers in Guangdong province tried desperately to keep their penises outside their bodies using whatever they had handy: string, chopsticks, relatives’ assistance, jewelers’ clamps, and safety pins. But the phenomenon was given little notice by Western scientists, who considered such strange mental conditions to be “ethnic hysterias” or “exotic psychoses.”
This way of thinking has changed, thanks largely to the work of a Hong Kong–based psychiatrist named Pow Meng Yap. In the early 1950s, Yap noticed a strange thing: a trickle of young men coming into his office, complaining that their penises were disappearing into their bodies and that when this happened they would die. After seeing nineteen such cases, Yap published a paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry entitled: “Koro—A Culture-Bound Depersonalization Syndrome.” For years, Yap had been interested in the interplay among culture, mind, and disease. In an earlier paper, “Mental Diseases Peculiar to Certain Cultures,” Yap had discussed other similar conditions: latah, a trance/fright neurosis in which the victim obeys commands from anyone nearby; amok, unrestrained outbursts of violence (as in “running amok”); and thanatomania, or self-induced “magical” death. Koro fit quite well among these other exotic maladies. In fact, it was perhaps the best example of a phenomenon that can arise only in a specific culture, a condition that occurs in a sense because of that culture. Yap saw that these ailments had this one feature in common, grouped them together, and gave them a name that, in spite of all the controversy to follow, would stick. They were “culture-bound syndromes.”
Under this rubric, koro and the other culture-bound syndromes are now treated with more respect, if not total acceptance. Science is, after all, the quest for universality. In psychiatry, this means all minds are treated the same and all conditions should exist equally across the world. Some thought that calling koro “culture-bound” was an end-run around the need for universality, a relativistic cop-out. Were these syndromes really caused by different cultures? Or were they just alternate names for afflictions that plagued, or could plague, every culture? This was precisely what I had come to Nigeria to find out, though so far with little success.
A few days after I arrived in Lagos, an article appeared in the newspaper. The headline read: court remands man over false alarm on genital organ disappearance. According to the paper, a young man named Wasiu Karimu was on a bus when he “was said to have let out a strident cry, claiming that his genital organ had disappeared. He immediately grabbed [Funmi] Bello, who was seated next to him, and shouted that the woman should restore his ‘stolen’ organ.” They got off the bus, and a crowd of “miscreants” swarmed around the woman, ready to kill her. But a passing police patrol intervened, stopped her from being lynched, and escorted them both to the police station, where Karimu told the commissioner “his organ was returning gradually.” The paper gave the exact address where Wasiu Karimu lived, so I decided to try and find out what exactly had transpired in his pants.
The day was already hot when a friend of a friend named Akeem and I rolled into Alagbado, the dusty, run-down town on the far edge of Lagos where Wasiu Karimu lived. We drove past clapboard shacks and little restaurants, through huge muddy pools, past people watching us from doorways, until we came to the address given in the paper. Chickens and goats scattered in front of our car, which we had borrowed from a journalist and which said press on the windshield. The house was an ample two-story affair with a little shop next to it. We got out and asked a girl if Wasiu lived there.
“Yes,” she said, “but he is not around.”
Akeem went into the yard in front of Wasiu Karimu’s house, and a woman jumped in front of him. She said she was Wasiu’s mother and began yelling at him to get out of the yard. Akeem retreated to the car, and we stood there in the middle of the road, in the sun. Wasiu Karimu was nowhere to be found, so we decided to wait for him to show up. But after about twenty minutes, several men came around the corner and took up posts around Wasiu’s house. A couple of them were holding long sticks.
Akeem turned to me and said, “Local Area Boys.”
In Lagos, the Area Boys are thugs—a law unto themselves. They have multiplied since the military dictatorship fell in 1998, seeding a new kind of terror throughout the city. These young men had an ugly swagger, and they looked as if they had run to get there. I could see sweat start to drip down Akeem’s head.
“Let us go,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. We had come a long way—in fact, I had come all the way from America for this and did not know how many chances I would get to speak to someone whose penis had actually been stolen. So I made us wait. I don’t know why. I suppose I figured we weren’t doing any harm. I only wanted to ask a few questions. I walked to the shop next to Wasiu Karimu’s house and bought something to drink.
The young girl at the shop said, “Sir, are you looking for someone?”
“Yes,” I said. “Wasiu Karimu.”
“Sir,” she said, “maybe you should just go now, before there are problems. It will be easier for everyone.”
I walked back to the car. “Okay,” I said to Akeem. Now I had a sick feeling. My own back was drenched with sweat. “Let’s go.”
Akeem shook his head and looked down the road. It had been cut off with two large wooden blocks and a car. There was no way out.
One of the local Area Boys looked particularly eager to deliver some punishment. He ran into the street with his cane and whacked it on the ground. “We will beat the press,” he yelled. “We will beat the press.”
The young men huddled together in front of Wasiu Karimu’s house. After a long delay, they called Akeem over. He talked to them for a little bit. Then they called me over. They wanted to see the article about Wasiu. I pulled the wrinkled photocopy out of my pocket and handed it over.
A quiet man in a 50 Cent T-shirt was clearly the leader. He took the article, unfolded it, and read through it.
“Let us see your I.D.,” he said. I hadn’t brought my passport, for exactly this reason, and my driver’s license had disappeared from my hotel room. All I had with me was an expired YMCA membership card, which I handed over.
The leader, whose name was Ade, took it and turned it over. He handed it to a lanky man with crooked teeth, who looked at it briefly, then handed it back.
“Do you know who we are?” asked Ade.
I did not.
“We are O.P.C. You know O.P.C.?”
The O.P.C. was the O’odua People’s Congress, a quasi-political organization that was halfway between the Area Boys and a militia. They were violent and arbitrary. Recently, they had killed several policemen in Lagos, and in some parts of the city they were being hunted by the government.
“We have to make sure,” Ade said, “you are not coming here to do some harm. Maybe you were sent here by that woman.” The woman, he meant, who stole Wasiu Karimu’s penis.
There was a crash, as a glass bottle exploded against one of the tires on our car. Both Akeem and I jumped.
“No,” I said trying to be calm. “I just want to ask some questions. Is he around?”
“He is not around.”
They talked among themselves in Yoruba, then Ade’s henchman with the bad teeth told the story. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Wasiu Karimu himself was apparently there, listening from a distance. Akeem told me later he was sure he had seen him—a little guy standing at the back, young and nervous.
Wasiu, Bad Teeth told me, had gotten on the bus and sat down next to this woman. He didn’t have a watch, so he asked her what time it was. She didn’t know. Then the conductor came around and asked her for her fare. She didn’t have that either. As she stood up to get out of the bus, she bumped into Wasiu.
“Then,” he said, “Wasiu Karimu felt something happen in his body. Something not right. And he checked and his thing was gone.”
“Was it gone,” I asked, “or was it shrinking?”
“Shrinking! Shrinking! It was getting smaller.”
And as he felt his penis shrink, Wasiu Karimu screamed and demanded the woman put his penis back. The conductor told them both to get off the bus, and a crowd closed in on the accused, not doubting for an instant that the woman could do such a thing. But as soon as she saw trouble coming, Bad Teeth said, she replaced Wasiu’s manhood, so when the police took him down to the station, they thought he was lying and arrested him instead.
“What did she want the penis for?” I asked Bad Teeth.
“For juju,” he said, “or maybe to make some money.”
Behind us, from the corner of my eye, I could see that the roadblocks had been removed.
“Do you have anything else you want to ask?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” he said. “You are free to go.”
“Thank you.”
I nodded to Akeem. We got in the car and drove away.
The debate over the term “culture-bound syndrome” seems to have simmered down as our understanding of “culture” has evolved. These days the terms “culture-bound” and, more often, “culture-related” have been grudgingly accepted; after all, how is Western medicine supposed to categorize such ailments as hikikomori, in which Japanese children refuse to leave their rooms for years on end, or dhat, in which Indians and Sri Lankans become ill with anxiety over semen loss, or zar, in which some Middle Easterners and North Africans are possessed by a spirit, or hwa-byung, the “fire illness” of Korean women in which anger is said to be manifesting itself in physical symptoms including “palpitations” and “a feeling of mass in the epigastrium”? How can we fit these, and a dozen other ailments, neatly into the pages of the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Western bible of maladies of the mind? The fact is that there was no good place until Pow Meng Yap created one—ill-fitting as it may be—for these unruly members of the family of mental conditions whose causes cannot be found just in one mind but instead must be sought in the social. These conditions are not purely psychogenic, as psychiatry’s universalists once held all things must be. They are also sociogenic, or emerging from the social fabric.
This debate has mirrored a larger debate that took place in the twentieth century over whether culture was something pure, something existing independently of the people who lived in it—something with an almost supernatural ability to shape those people into fundamentally different beings—or merely accumulated wisdom, the chance collection of the behavior of a group of individuals. Was culture a quasi-independent superorganism that shaped people? Or was it just a collection of human organisms? Did it produce us, or did we produce it?
Lately, a more nuanced conception of culture has emerged, as evolutionary psychology begins to shed some light on what exactly culture is. It is neither nature nor nurture. It is both at the same time, a positive feedback loop of tendencies and behaviors and knowledge and beliefs. It is, as the science writer Matt Ridley has called it, nature via nurture, or as primatologist Frans de Waal put it in his book The Ape and the Sushi Master, “an extremely powerful modifier—affecting everything we do and are, penetrating to the core of human existence.”
In 1998, Charles Hughes, co-editor of Culture-Bound Syndromes: Folk Illnesses of Psychiatric and Anthropological Interest, one of the few books on the phenomenon, wrote a scathing critique of the DSM-IV’s treatment of culture-bound syndromes, which had been gathered together in the back of the book in an appendix as if they were still under glass, a museum of exotica where nothing had changed since these ills were considered “ethnic psychoses” that affected primitive people but not us. Hughes argued that the borders around culture-bound syndromes are inherently fuzzy and that to rope them off at the back of the DSM-IV is a farce. He lamented the lack of a “short course in sophisticated cultural awareness” for psychiatrists and said that “[t]o use the class-designated term ‘culture-bound [psychiatric] syndromes’ is comparable to using the terms ‘culture-bound religion,’ ‘culture-bound language,’ or ‘culture-bound technology,’ for each of these institutional areas is shaped by, and in its specific details is unique to, its cultural setting.”
In other words, everything else in the DSM-IV, and in life, is culture-bound, too. While koro and its culture-bound kin languish at the back, other conditions such as multiple personality disorder, bulimia nervosa, type A personality, muscle dysmorphia, belief in government-implanted computer chips, and pet hoarding are given universal status because Western psychiatrists cannot see beyond their own cultural horizons.
Starrys Obazi sat across the table from me at Mr. Bigg’s, a cheap fast-food place on the north side of Lagos where we had agreed to meet. Around us, other Nigerians walked past with their trays and sat down to eat their burgers and watch rap videos on the television behind us. Starrys dug into his chicken. A wiry little man with a nasal voice, he had been an editor for fourteen years at FAME, a Nigerian celebrity tabloid, until the publisher mysteriously stopped paying him. Jobs, even low-paying editorial jobs, were tough to come by in Lagos, and it had been several years since Starrys had held one.
Here, in the flesh, finally, was a man whose penis had been stolen. It happened one day in 1990, when Starrys was a reporter at the Evening Times. While he was waiting for a bus to take him to work, a man approached him and held out a piece of paper with a street name on it.
“Do you know where this is?” the man asked, without saying the name. Starrys did not know the street, and he thought this was strange. He didn’t believe the street existed. Then another man behind Starrys, without seeing the paper, said where the street was. This was even stranger.
The two men walked away, and Starrys started to feel something he had never felt before.
“At that moment,” Starrys told me, leaning forward, “I felt something depart my body. I began to feel empty inside. I put my hand into my pants, and touched my thing. It was unusually small—smaller than the normal size. And the scrotum was flat. I put my fingers into the sockets, and they were not there. The testes were gone. And I was just feeling empty!” His voice strained as he recalled the panic of that day.
Starrys ran after the men and confronted them. “Something happened to my penis!” he told the man who had asked for directions. The man said he had no idea what Starrys was talking about.
“Something told me inside not to shout,” he said. “Because as soon as I shouted, he would have been lynched. And if he was lynched, how could I get my penis back?”
I watched as Starrys finished his chicken and wiped his hands. “It was one quarter of its normal size,” he said emphatically, as if, even now, even he could not believe it had happened. But Starrys, a journalist and a worldly man, did believe it. And as I listened to him tell his story, I almost believed it, too. I could feel the intensity, the fear. It made a kind of sense, even if it didn’t make sense at all. I could start to see the world that his fear came from. I could see what it was built on, and for a few minutes I could imagine standing there with Starrys on a street corner, alone in the world, helpless and missing my most cherished possession. I let go of my doubts and gave in to the panic in Starrys’s voice, and it was real, utterly. And I was afraid. This was how koro could be caught.
Starrys continued with his story. Despite the men’s denials, one of them agreed to accompany Starrys to a nearby hospital to document the theft. But just as they arrived at the hospital, the man grabbed Starrys and bellowed, “LET’S GO IIIIN!” And at that moment something happened.
“When he grabbed me,” Starrys said, “I felt calm again. I felt an inner calm. I checked my testes, and they were there.” He checked his penis as well, and the missing three quarters had returned. The doctor examined Starrys and pronounced him fine. On hearing Starrys’s story, though, the doctor admonished the penis thief to quit causing trouble on the street.
I thought about Starrys. He had been a skeptic before his encounter; but on that day, his inner world shifted, and he became afraid. He stopped giving directions. He stopped trusting strangers. He knew that magical penis loss was a real and terrifying possibility. He had, in a sense, been drawn into the culture, into its beliefs, so far that he had caught this culture-bound syndrome.
We all go through a similar process of being formed by the culture around us. It is something described well in Bruce Wexler’s book Brain and Culture: Neuroscience, Ideology and Social Change, in which Wexler argues that much of human conflict arises from our efforts to reconcile the world as we believe it to exist (our internal structures) with the world we live in. According to Wexler, we develop an inner world, a neuropsychological framework of values, cause and effect, expectations, and a general understanding of how things work. This inner world, which underpins our culture, forms through early adulthood, after which we strive to ensure it exists, or continues to exist, in the world outside. Those inner structures can change in adulthood, but it is more difficult given our decreased brain plasticity.
That different internal structures exert different pressures on the mind (and body) should not be surprising. Every culture has its own logic, its own beliefs, its own stresses. Once one buys into its assumptions, one becomes a prisoner to the logic. For some people, that means a march toward its more tragic conclusions.
Not long ago, medical researchers noticed a strange phenomenon: Turks in Germany, Vietnamese in England, and Mexicans in America all registered better health than native residents. This phenomenon has come to be called the “healthy migrant effect.” Although most of the research has focused on physical indicators (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.), recent studies have started to look at the mental health of immigrants, which seems to show a similar pattern. In 2000, one study concluded that first-generation Mexican immigrants have better mental health than their children born in the United States, despite the latter group’s significant socioeconomic advantages—a finding, it noted, that was “inconsistent with traditional tenets on the relationship among immigration, acculturation, and psychopathology.” The stress of immigration is assumed to have major mental-health costs, but here the opposite seemed to be true: the longer immigrants remained in a developed country, the worse their mental health became.
For this reason, the healthy-migrant effect is also called the “acculturation paradox”: the more acculturated one is, the less healthy one becomes. One study of Turkish immigrants to Germany showed the effect to last for at least a generation. A subsequent 2004 study of Mexican immigrants to the United States showed that “[w]ith few exceptions, foreign-born Mexican Americans and foreign-born non-Hispanic whites were at significantly lower risk of DSM-IV substance-use and mood-anxiety disorders compared with their US-born counterparts.” These included alcohol and drug abuse, major depression, dysthymia, mania, hypomania, panic disorder, social and specific phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder. The longer they lived in the United States, the more they showed the particular damage to the mind that our particular culture wreaks. People who come to America eventually find themselves subject to our own culture-related syndromes, which the DSM-IV can easily recognize and categorize, as acculturation forces their internal worlds to conform to the external world, i.e., the American culture that the DSM-IV knows best.
I could feel something similar happening to me in Nigeria. I could feel plates shifting. I did not try to hold them back. As I listened to the tales of friends of friends, as I read the horror stories in newspapers, as I watched the angry crowds on television, as I saw the fear and hatred in the eyes of the young O.P.C. men, and as I sat across from Starrys Obazi and heard the panic in his voice, I could feel my own mind opening to this world where such things were possible. I could see the logic. I could feel the edge of belief. Something was starting to make sense. Now and then I would catch myself feeling strangely vulnerable between my legs.
I was almost there, and it was time to see if I could get in just a little further.
The winding streets of Lagos were packed with people. Tens of thousands, coming and going, moving along sidewalks, jamming the streets so thickly that cars had to push through them at a crawl, blaring their horns and parting crowds like a snowplow.
I was far from Jankara Market when I started out and headed southwest toward Idumota, to walk through some of the most crowded streets in the world, where I hoped to brush up against the boundary of this culture. I wanted to look back and see someone checking if his manhood was still in place.
I climbed some stairs near a bank and stopped to watch the city flow by. I walked back down the stairs and jumped into the onrush. I moved with it. Together we were packed tightly, but we rarely touched. The winding streams of people ran easily along next to one another. I moved farther into the city, and as I did, I watched the people pass within inches of me, then feint, slip by, barely brushing me. At first I tried to nudge a few people with my shoulder, but most were too fast, too alert, too leery.
Walking along, I caught one man on the shoulder with mine. But when I looked back, it seemed like he hadn’t even noticed. Then I clipped another man a little harder, but when I looked back, it was like I wasn’t even there. I bumped a few more people lightly, until finally I caught one man enough that I’m sure he knew it was purposeful.
But the magic failed. He didn’t reach down and grab himself, didn’t point to me, didn’t accuse. He didn’t even give me a dirty look. I was swimming in the water, but I could not get all the way in, no matter how deep I dove. And so I let go, walked on, and allowed the current to carry me wherever it would.

The Playboy Interview with Stephen Colbert by Eric Spitznagel at www.playboy.com

A candid interview with Comedy Central's other satiric genius about politics, grief, growing up, and why it's terrible when Bill O'Reilly acts normal.

One of the most controversial political attack ads of the year didn’t originate with an actual candidate or political party. It came from Stephen Colbert. Or more accurately, “Stephen Colbert,” his satirical alter ego. The ad was funded by Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, a super PAC formed by Colbert as part of his “exploratory committee to lay the groundwork for [his] possible candidacy for president of the United States of South Carolina.” The super PAC ad suggested, in no uncertain terms, that presidential hopeful Mitt Romney might be a serial killer. “He’s Mitt the Ripper,” the voice-over declared. When asked about the ads by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, Colbert (or “Colbert”) claimed ignorance. “I had nothing to do with that ad,” he said. Technically he was following to the letter the rules of super PACs, which are allowed, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, to raise unlimited funds for attack ads without being directly connected to a campaign or candidate.

“I don’t know if Mitt Romney is a serial killer,” he told Stephanopoulos. “That’s a question he’s going to have to answer.… I do not want any untrue ads on the air that could in any way be traced back to me.”

It was brilliant political satire—earning Colbert a prestigious Peabody Award, his second—that crossed into the realm of performance art. Colbert mocked the system from within, using himself as a comedic straw man. Although Colbert’s main gig is behind a desk as host of Comedy Central’s faux pundit news show The Colbert Report, it wasn’t the first time he’d blurred the line between satirist and subject. Colbert has mocked President George W. Bush to his face at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration (where he called for Americans “to stop eating fruits and vegetables”) and co-hosted with The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart a political rally on the National Mall that attracted an estimated 215,000 participants.

Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, Colbert was the youngest of 11 kids. He had a happy childhood, at least for the first decade of his life. But in 1974, when he was 10 years old, his father, Dr. James Colbert, and his two brothers closest to him in age—Peter, 15, and Paul, 18—were killed in an airliner crash. Colbert found solace in science fiction and acting. He ended up in Chicago, studying theater at Northwestern University and joining the Second City comedy theater. He was hired as a correspondent and writer by The Daily Show in 1997, where he stayed for nine years before the network offered him The Colbert Report. Within a year, Colbert was averaging 1.5 million viewers a night. In April he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.

The 48-year-old comedian has two best-selling books, I Am America (and So Can You!) and the children’s book I Am a Pole (and So Can You!), and a new book, America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t. He enjoys a quiet home life in Montclair, New Jersey with his wife, Evelyn—an actress he met in 1990—and their three children, Madeline, Peter and John.

We sent writer Eric Spitznagel, who last interviewed Charlie Sheen for PLAYBOY, to talk with Colbert. He reports: “I met Colbert at his studio office in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. I’d actually met him before, back in 1992, when I was a newly minted box-office employee at Second City in Chicago and he was in his final months performing with the main-stage cast. As we talked, Colbert sat behind his desk, his most recent Peabody in front of him, and outside the open window behind him an American flag fluttered in the breeze, perfectly positioned over his right shoulder in a way even his fictional doppelgänger couldn’t hope to choreograph.”

PLAYBOY: When people meet you for the first time, which version do they want, Stephen Colbert or “Stephen Colbert”?

COLBERT: I think they always want to meet the guy who’s going to show up and tell jokes. But if I’m asked to do something that isn’t specifically a performance, then I have to be very specific that he’s never going to show up.

PLAYBOY: “He” being the other Stephen?

COLBERT: That’s right. If I’m doing a talk show or an interview like this, or pretty much anything where I can’t control the context, I’m loath to do the character.

PLAYBOY: Why?

COLBERT: Because outside the context of the show, you have to be okay with the clang of him against reality.

PLAYBOY: But isn’t that what makes him funny?

COLBERT: Yeah, but that doesn’t always work in a different context. We create our own reality on the show. I’m in a cocoon of the character’s creation. Even within that reality, he’s in a cocoon. Unless I’m doing something like the Correspondents’ Dinner, testifying before Congress, doing the rally or something where I’m purposively injecting myself into a story, there’s no benefit to pushing him up against reality. While I’m an improviser and enjoy discovery, the show follows a script. I have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. It’s a very crafted, controlled environment.

PLAYBOY: You can’t control what happens with the guests, can you? They’re not following a script.

COLBERT: No, but they’ve all been warned. I tell everybody the same thing: “I do the show in character, and he’s an idiot.”

PLAYBOY: Is that still necessary? Do people come on The Colbert Report and not know what to expect?

COLBERT: It’s usually someone from another country or from a rigorous academic discipline who doesn’t have a lot of time for TV. Mostly I tell them because it’s a ritual for me. I have to remind myself what I’m about to do, because I rarely hit it as hard as I used to.

PLAYBOY: Why not?

COLBERT: It’s hard to remember. Often I’m just very interested in what my guests have to say. You have to be vigilant to stay ignorant.

PLAYBOY: Your guests have to be willing to play along too.

COLBERT: They do, yes. That’s what I tell them before the show. I tell them, “He’s willfully ignorant of what you know and care about. Honestly disabuse him of his ignorance and we’ll have a good time.” The important thing in that sentence is [speaks slowly] “honestly disabuse him of his ignorance.” Actually tell him why he’s wrong. Hopefully that makes it easier for the guest. All they have to do, as my guest producer Emily Lazar says, is talk to him as though he’s a harmless drunk at the next bar stool.

PLAYBOY: That can still be intimidating. You’re essentially asking them to walk into an argument.

COLBERT: Yeah, but it’s an argument with an idiot. Some people perceive me as an assassin or at least someone who can slip under your guard with a knife. But if you watch what I do, that’s almost never the case. I’m just trying to keep the balloon in the air. It rarely turns into anything combative. It’s mostly just silly, or it’s my character expressing his ignorance on a difficult or not-at-all difficult subject. It’s an opportunity to knock down common ignorances. And I would pray that guests do that.

PLAYBOY: Democratic Virginia congressman Jim Moran compared doing your show to “consensual rape.” Does that seem about right?

COLBERT: I wouldn’t put that on my business card, nor would I make it my campaign slogan if I were Jim Moran. I suppose the consensual part was him being unbelievably playful. He was up for anything, even after I called him a poor man’s Ted Kennedy.

PLAYBOY: If people think you’re an assassin or that being on the show is like rape, why do they do it? What’s the benefit for them?

COLBERT: I don’t know. Maybe they have a book to sell. I hope that perception is starting to change. I think politicians are the only ones who are wary about us. That’s why we get almost no conservatives anymore. Even conservative pundits are hard to come by, which is too bad.

PLAYBOY: Who’s your ideal guest?
COLBERT: We want someone who represents something, who feels strongly about what they’re talking about and will allow for a little dramatic friction. The most disappointing guest is somebody who won’t be their personality.
PLAYBOY: What does that mean? How can you not be your personality?
COLBERT: Take Mr. Bill O’Reilly. He was a perfectly lovely guest, but he wouldn’t be his personality. He wouldn’t be the guy he is on his show. And I don’t know why. I went on his show, and I was my personality. That was our deal; I’d go on his show and he’d come on mine. But he came on my show and he wasn’t his personality. He wasn’t an unpleasant person. He’s a perfectly fine guest and I have no complaints other than the fact that I booked Bill O’Reilly and I got William O’Reilly.
PLAYBOY: Did he give you any advice? Any words of wisdom from one pundit to another?
COLBERT: He said, “Watch your guest list. If you book the same kind of people over and over—Al Franken, Keith Olbermann—people notice that pattern.” I told him, “Oh, Bill, I toy with those guys. I’m slapping them around.” He said, “I know, but not everybody is watching your show as closely as I am.” I was like [clasps hands and holds them to his chest], “I’ve totally made it!” That was about five, six months into the show.
PLAYBOY: One of your friends from high school said you once joked about starting a cult. Is that true?
COLBERT: Yeah, that was an L. Ron Hubbard reference. I was with a bunch of guys—we were all science fiction fans—and we were sitting around one day, drinking beer or doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing, talking about power. The question posed was, If you wanted power over people, what would you do? What career would you pursue? I remember one guy, who’s actually a colonel now, said, “If I wanted real power, I wouldn’t be a politician. I’d be in the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” It got around to me, and I said, “Well, I think I would probably major in psychology and start a cult.” [laughs] There’s something enjoyable about cults to me.
PLAYBOY: Enjoyable?
COLBERT: I’m interested in what makes someone a cult figure and what engenders cult adherence, what engenders that behavior.
PLAYBOY: Are you surprised people are drawn to cults?
COLBERT: Not surprised. I’m fascinated. I’m fascinated that people want to know what to do. And people want to know what to think. And people want to know how to feel. Not just what to feel but how to feel.
PLAYBOY: Do you think that’s unnatural?
COLBERT: No, it’s completely natural. I’m surprised there aren’t more unbalanced people in the world, because being alive is not easy. We’re just not that nice to one another. We’re all we have, and Jesus, are we shitty to one another. We really are. The only thing that keeps us going back to one another is that we’re all filled with such enormous self-doubt. We have doubts about our ability to be alone, to self-actualize. We’re on such a rocky road all the time. Every moment is new. Every inch of the mountain is fresh snow. If someone said, “I have been out ahead and I know what you’re supposed to do,” if I believed that were true, I would absolutely obey whatever father told me. I would stay on the compound.
PLAYBOY: You would just as happily be a cult member as a cult leader?
COLBERT: I’d love to be a cult member, just another loyal follower. It sounds very comforting.
PLAYBOY: The Colbert Nation could arguably be described as a cult.
COLBERT: In the loosest possible sense. It’s an ironic cult.
PLAYBOY: But your audience listens to you. It may be a joke, but it’s a joke with a lot of followers.
COLBERT: Which is not what we set out to do. When we started the show, we wanted it to have a mythos that would never be real. We’d play on the difference between reality and my character’s perception of reality.
PLAYBOY: He would think he had influence but he really didn’t?
COLBERT: Exactly. He thinks he says things and people listen and take action. He has a nation, this army he can mobilize. We were already too successful for that joke, to play on the vast difference in status between thinking you’re a prophet and being on a show that nobody watches.
PLAYBOY: Because people were actually watching, and they got the joke.
COLBERT: Not only did they get it, they were willing to play along. I’m constantly awed by their willingness to play along with almost anything. They actually cheer things they don’t believe in because my character says it. You know what I mean? I have a generally liberal audience, but they will applaud when I nail a liberal lion because they want my character to win. It’s a strange relationship that seems natural now, but every so often I have to remind myself that this is not normal. This is not common.
PLAYBOY: Will they do pretty much anything you say, or are there rules and parameters?
COLBERT: I put a lot of thought into the ways we engage with them. [laughs] I always say “we,” like “We’re pregnant.” But there are a lot of people involved. It’s not just me, by any means. With the audience, we think about things like whether we are dictating their actions or inviting them to take action. Dictation of action is not nearly as fun for an audience. We’ve done it sometimes, and it’s been a mistake. It’s much better to invite them to be part of an action rather than saying, “I command you to do this.” The other thing is, you have to follow through. If you initiate a game and they take part, you can’t stop until it reaches a mutually satisfying resolution.
PLAYBOY: The Colbert character is obsessed with fear. He even had a rally in Washington, “Keep Fear Alive.” Why is fear so intoxicating?
COLBERT: I suppose fear is like a drug. A little bit isn’t that bad, but you can get addicted to the consumption and distribution of it. What’s evil is the purposeful distribution of fear. As Paul said when he was faced with the gom jabbar, “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.”
PLAYBOY: Did you just make a Dune reference?
COLBERT: I did! [laughs] If you’re injecting fear into other people, then you’re trying to kill their minds. You’re trying to get them to stop thinking. That’s antithetical to the founding of this country. It’s on the Jefferson Memorial. I’m stealing this from Jefferson, but I’m also stealing it from the movie Born Yesterday. Bill Holden takes Judy Holliday to the Jefferson Memorial, and they read the inscription together. “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Fear is an attempt to impose tyranny over someone’s mind. It’s an act of oppression.
PLAYBOY: We know what Stephen Colbert the character is afraid of, or trying to make us afraid of.
COLBERT: Everything.
PLAYBOY: Bears, jazz robots, happiness.
COLBERT: [Laughs] The list is endless.
PLAYBOY: But what about you? What are you, the real Stephen Colbert, afraid of?
COLBERT: [Pauses] Accidentally driving my boat into a pillar with loved ones onboard.

PLAYBOY: You are going to need to elaborate on that.COLBERT: I really like boats. I was driving a boat this summer with my family and some friends. About a quarter mile away there was a channel marker, and I was heading straight for it. Now there is no way on God’s green earth that I would not have seen that channel marker in the 45 seconds it would have taken me to get to it. But at the second it appeared I wasn’t looking up. I was looking at my instrument panel. Then I looked up and my wife said, “You see the channel marker, right?” And I said, “Of course.” But I actually hadn’t seen it yet. I have no doubt that everything would have been fine, but in my mind I see myself for the next 45 seconds, I don’t know, somehow…closing my eyes and slamming into the channel marker with a boat full of friends. [pauses] I don’t know what that means.
PLAYBOY: That’s an incredibly specific fear.
COLBERT: It really is. [laughs]
PLAYBOY: You could have just said “drowning.”
COLBERT: I don’t like spiders. How about that?
PLAYBOY: That works.
COLBERT: I actually don’t like bears.
PLAYBOY: Seriously? Like your character?
COLBERT: I don’t dislike bears, but I am kind of afraid of them. There was a time when, if I had dreams about bears, something bad was going on in my life.
PLAYBOY: How did bears become a recurring motif on the show? Was it just to have something to talk about that wasn’t topical?
COLBERT: For the very first show, we were trying to find something that had a repeatable structure. We had this bit called “ThreatDown,” when he talks about the number one threat to America that week. We were considering another story, something from Florida about a Burmese python that had grown to 13 feet long and swallowed an alligator and the alligator had eaten its way out of the snake. It was a really crazy story with horrible pictures. Then a bear story came up that wasn’t as flashy, but we went with it. Partly because bears are very resonant to me, because I really do have a bit of a bear problem. And it just seemed like a richer fear to us. We always said that anything my character is concerned about qualifies as news. If he says bears are the number one threat to America, then that is the case.
PLAYBOY: He’s justifying his own anxieties?
COLBERT: Exactly. “I want to make you afraid of the things I’m afraid of.”
PLAYBOY: Do you feel tied to the news cycle? When you’re doing political comedy, a joke may be funny in the morning and irrelevant by that afternoon.
COLBERT: There’s a good and a bad in that. We are the shadow cast by real people. And that shadow changes shape as the news cycle changes shape, so you always have fresh dirt to dig in. That’s exciting. Like with this presidential race. It’s as simple a narrative as any made-for-TV movie: two men, one victorious.
PLAYBOY: So how do you deal with that?
COLBERT: We know everything that happens structurally between here and there. You just prepare yourself to collect the news on the dates that are preordained. There are surprises, but there’s a tent pole of a narrative between today and the inauguration. But we also try to release ourselves from that. We don’t need to follow what everyone says is the story. Not because we’re mavericks but because sometimes the story holds no interest for me. I’m perfectly happy to talk about a story that’s not necessarily timely or newsworthy but is just interesting to me. Like super PACs.
PLAYBOY: Super PACs aren’t newsworthy?
COLBERT: They’re newsworthy, but they weren’t in the news. Not many people at the time were talking about super PACs, at least not in the mainstream media. Most people had no idea what they were, so for the first six months we had to explain them to the audience every time I brought them up. That process of educating the audience is really educating ourselves.
PLAYBOY: But you took it one step further and started your own super PAC.
COLBERT: We did, yeah.
PLAYBOY: Isn’t that unnecessarily complicated? Why not just make jokes about super PACs in the abstract? Wouldn’t that be easier, and cheaper?
COLBERT: It would be, absolutely. But I have an opportunity as this character to do things. I have an opportunity to do things that lead to discovery.
PLAYBOY: For you or the audience?
COLBERT: For me and the audience. If you just talk about it, everyone sits on their hands and the reality of it just watches as you talk about it. But by putting yourself in it, reality has to respond to your actions. I don’t pretend that the camera doesn’t change things. But it’s a version of reality that allows us to show what normally doesn’t get seen.
PLAYBOY: How much money did you ultimately raise for your super PAC?
COLBERT: About $1.4 million. We’ve got somewhere between $850,000 and $900,000 left. We’ve spent about half a million dollars of it so far. Because running for president—or not running for president, whatever it was we did—is expensive. But I can spend it on anything I want. I could use my super PAC money to buy a private jet, and I have to justify it to no one. I wouldn’t have known that unless I had my own super PAC. That’s the great thing about throwing yourself into the story. You find out things you wouldn’t have known otherwise.
PLAYBOY: Have you always had this curiosity? As a kid, did you get the same excitement from digging into a complicated subject and trying to figure out how it ticks?
COLBERT: To some extent, sure. Any curiosity I have probably comes from my dad. He was a big thinker, a true intellectual. His idea of a good time was to read French philosophy, often French Christian philosophy.
PLAYBOY: Did he have strong political opinions?
COLBERT: I don’t really know. The only bumper sticker my parents ever had just said “Kennedy.” That’s all it said. And my father was I think president of Physicians for Kennedy. We have a picture of my father and President Kennedy at the White House. My father had just come out of a rainstorm. He’s soaking wet and wearing a raincoat. Kennedy is shaking his hand and my father is just laughing. That’s the only political involvement I know about. Otherwise, I think my parents were pretty conservative.
PLAYBOY: Were your parents funny?
COLBERT: My mom is very warm and funny and quick to laugh and quick to hug and kiss. My father died when I was pretty young, so I don’t remember any specific jokes, but he certainly encouraged us to be funny. But my brothers and sisters are the funniest people in the world to me. I have comedy influences, other comics I really like, but none of them is as influential as those 10 people above me. I’ve had people say, “Oh, you’re the baby. You have a built-in audience.” But I was their audience.
PLAYBOY: What kind of comedy did the Colbert kids enjoy? Slapstick, wordplay?
COLBERT: Everything. Every one of them is different. Some are great at telling stories. Some are into jokes. For my brother Billy it was all about jokes. “A guy walks into a bar.” And W.C. Fields. He had W.C. Fields posters all over his room. If there was a W.C. Fields festival on television, he would force me to watch it. “You have to watch this pool cue trick that he does.” Or Gahan Wilson. Billy was a huge Gahan Wilson fan. It was very dark comedy, and I was a little kid, but he’d show me all these Gahan Wilson cartoons. And he taught me how to juggle. [laughs] My brother Billy was a big comedic influence.
PLAYBOY: When did you think you might want to be more than just an audience member?
COLBERT: It was when we were driving back from my father’s funeral. He was buried in Annapolis, and we were all driving home in a funeral limo. I don’t know if that’s what they’re called. It’s a limo with the jump seats that face front and back, like the presidential limo where the aide is talking to the president. You know what I’m talking about? In those espionage movies, right before the aide shoots the president and you find out he’s really a Russian spy or whatever. It’s that Mission Impossible style of limo.
PLAYBOY: We know what you mean.
COLBERT: One of my sisters, I think it was Mary, made a joke to Margo. Or it could have been Lulu to both of them. I don’t remember. One of them made Margo laugh so hard, she snorted and fell on the floor. There was enough room between the seats to actually fall on the floor of this limo.
PLAYBOY: Do you remember the joke?
COLBERT: [Pauses] I don’t, but I remember the laughter. I remember thinking [softly] I would like that. That connection.
PLAYBOY: Your father and two brothers died when you were just 10.
COLBERT: That’s right.
PLAYBOY: They were on a commercial airliner that crashed while landing in thick fog. Your brothers were both teenagers, and your father was taking them to Connecticut to enroll them in private school. How did you make sense of their deaths?
COLBERT: Things didn’t seem that important anymore. Nothing seemed that important anymore. My mother said to me—and I think she said this to all my brothers and sisters—she urged me to look at everything in the light of eternity. In other words, it doesn’t matter what I wear. I just wear the uniform of my youth. I wear an oxford-cloth shirt and khakis. What does it matter? What does it matter what I wear?
PLAYBOY: As a 10-year-old boy who just lost his dad, that advice helped you?
COLBERT: Sure, absolutely.
PLAYBOY: It’s been almost four decades since it happened. Does the grief dissipate?
COLBERT: No. It’s not as keen. Well, it’s not as present, how about that? It’s just as keen but not as present. But it will always accept the invitation. Grief will always accept the invitation to appear. It’s got plenty of time for you.
PLAYBOY: “I’ll be here.”
COLBERT: That’s right. “I’ll be here when you need me.” The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase He was visited by grief, because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.
PLAYBOY: It’s a loud wolf. It huffs and it puffs.
COLBERT: [Laughs] It does, doesn’t it? It can rattle the hinges.
PLAYBOY: Not long after their deaths, you immersed yourself in science fiction.

COLBERT: It was right after we buried my father and brothers. I was staying with my brother Ed, who’s 18 years older than I am and was married with kids. I was in their guest bedroom, where they kept stacks of science fiction books. I just randomly picked up The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton by Larry Niven. I read it and loved it. From there I just dove into the world of science fiction. When I was 13, one of my friends pressed into my hands The Lord of the Rings and said, “You’ve got to read this.” And I loved it. As you can tell, I’m a little obsessed. [points to a Lord of the Rings pinball machine in the corner of his office]PLAYBOY: What appealed to you about the books as a teenager?
COLBERT: In some ways it was about escape. I think there’s absolute truth in escaping the reality of your present predicament. And that can just be about being young. It doesn’t have to be tragedy. There’s a tragedy to being 13. Things are changing. Friends are changing. Your body is changing. You need to escape that. My additional emotional crises don’t necessarily explain my interest in it.
PLAYBOY: Didn’t you visit the Hobbit film shoot in New Zealand?
COLBERT: I did. [Director] Peter Jackson invited me to the set last year. I flew out and watched them shoot some scenes and went to some locations. I saw a 25-minute cut, and it was amazing. Jackson knows I’m a big fan of the films.
PLAYBOY: You flew out to New Zealand just to watch? He didn’t hire you as an extra or something?
COLBERT: [Smiles]
PLAYBOY: Are you telling us you’re in the Hobbit movie?
COLBERT: Could be. [smiles]
PLAYBOY: Can you elaborate?
COLBERT: [Fumbles with paper on his desk] So, uh, I was just writing Mr. Jackson a note to congratulate him on making The Hobbit into three movies. Because I think that’s just fantastic.
PLAYBOY: You’re not going to tell us anything, are you?
COLBERT: [Smiles, says nothing]
PLAYBOY: You sneaky bastard.
COLBERT: You were asking how the book affected me as a teenager.
PLAYBOY: Sure, let’s talk about that.
COLBERT: I think [Lord of the Rings character] Aragorn is the model of manhood. He’s the Apollonian ideal. He’s a warrior, a scholar, a poet, a healer. He’s all things you can aspire to be. As a kid I thought I wanted to be like that.
PLAYBOY: But it wasn’t all science fiction and fantasy for you. You also had a collection of Bill Cosby stand-up records.
COLBERT: Yeah, after the boys died, I inherited their record collection. I had Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right! and Wonderfulness, and I listened to them over and over and over again, every night. [pauses, looks at his feet] I just wore them out.
PLAYBOY: Do you still have them?
COLBERT: Not the originals, no. But somebody sent me those two albums on CD, as a thank-you for something. I have them on my iPod now, and I can do every joke. I can do every joke with the exact same rhythm and timing that Mr. Cosby does them, after 30 years of not listening to them, because they were so deeply ingrained in me. The funny thing is, the albums were so scratched that I missed entire punch lines. He’d be doing a setup, and then it would skip ahead to a huge laugh. And in my mind I was like, What could that punch line have been? I was writing Bill Cosby’s punch lines in my head.
PLAYBOY: Now that you’ve heard the CD versions, were you close?
COLBERT: Not at all. [laughs] My jokes were so far off.
PLAYBOY: Were those albums the only things you inherited from your brothers?
COLBERT: No, I got clothes and all kinds of things. I still have…I still have my brother Peter’s belt. I’ve been carrying it in my closet since I was 10. I didn’t even realize I’d been holding on to it until last year, when my son Peter had to go off to school one day.
PLAYBOY: Your son is also named Peter?
COLBERT: Yeah. I think it was a school concert, and he had to wear a belt and couldn’t find his. I said, “Oh, I have something that might fit you.” I went and found it and put it on him. It was a small belt. Peter was a skinny guy. I belted it on my son and my wife, Evie, said, “Where did this belt come from?”
PLAYBOY: Was that when you realized?
COLBERT: Yeah. I said, “Oh, that’s Peter’s.” And she said, “You have your brother’s belt?” And it occurred to me at that moment that I had moved that belt from closet to closet for 37 years without telling anyone, not even my wife, whom I’ve known for 20 years. We moved many times, and in every new house I’ve been [mimes clicking the belt onto a hook].
PLAYBOY: That makes sense. What were you going to do, throw it away?
COLBERT: That’s exactly it! What do you do with these things? The other day I thought, I wonder what happened to that belt. And I realized that I don’t care. Now I don’t care.
PLAYBOY: Because you gave it to your son?
COLBERT: Because it got used. It got used. I remember when I was a teenager, I went skiing in Vermont. I had an aunt up there, my mother’s older sister, who lived in Plainfield and was a dairy farmer. You need goggles when you ski, and I wore my uncle Eddie’s goggles. These were black, heavy rubber goggles, with dark green lenses. He wore them while he was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne.

PLAYBOY: The Screaming Eagles?COLBERT: That’s right. He died in the war. These were the goggles he wore on D-Day, and I would ski in his goggles. I remember on one of these ski trips, I lost the goggles. I had to tell my mom. I was devastated. And she said to me, “These things are to be used.”
PLAYBOY: She sounds like a wise woman.
COLBERT: She is.
PLAYBOY: Was she supportive of your becoming an actor?
COLBERT: Absolutely. She had wanted to be an actress at one point in her life. She spent a lot of her college years doing theater, but then she got sick. She was bedridden for much of a year. When she recovered, my father said, “Let’s get married.” And they did, and she never did theater again. Her mother wanted to be an actress too, but that was very frowned upon in my grandmother’s day. Being an actress was akin to being a streetwalker.
PLAYBOY: So you have acting in your DNA?
COLBERT: I do. My mother always loved acting and taught us as kids how to do falls.
PLAYBOY: Pratfalls?
COLBERT: Right. She would be in the kitchen and she’d suddenly just faint in a swoon, put a hand on her forehead and fall backward like this [demonstrates a melodramatic swoon], like Cleopatra learning of the loss of Antony or something. She would teach us to do the roll-down so you wouldn’t hurt yourself as you fell. “Remember, it’s ankle, knee, hip, chest, arm, head.” We all learned how to do the falls. And we’d fall all over the house, all the time, and my mom was fine with it. I guess that love for all things theatrical just rubbed off on me. Also, I met my wife at the theater because of my mom.
PLAYBOY: How so?
COLBERT: She had an extra ticket to the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. She asked if I wanted to go, and I said sure. I walked into the theater, and there across the lobby was my wife. I thought, Oh, wow, there’s my wife.
PLAYBOY: You knew immediately?
COLBERT: There was never a doubt in my mind.
PLAYBOY: Did you talk to her first, or did she talk to you?
COLBERT: [Laughs] That’s a two-hour story, I’m afraid. It really is. People who have heard the whole story—and it’s not a bad story; it’s a good story—will later say to Evie, “Stephen told me the story of how you guys met.” And Evie will go, “I’m so sorry.” I can’t start it and leave out any details, because to me it’s somewhat miraculous that we’re married. Let’s just say I met her at a theater and leave it at that.
PLAYBOY: Didn’t she know Jon Stewart before you did?
COLBERT: She did. She was an actress living in New York, on the Lower East Side in Alphabet City. Jon was a young guy trying to do comedy in New York. A friend of Evie’s, her roommate, dated Jon’s roommate. Or something like that. So Jon ran in her social circle. It was this gang of people who hung out, some of whom came to New York to be actors, some of whom came to do architecture. They were all University of Virginia people. Some just came to New York to be part of the go-go 1980s. It was very Bright Lights, Big City.
PLAYBOY: Was there lots of cocaine and recreational sex?
COLBERT: [Laughs] I don’t know what they were doing. Jon just remembers the world not being enough for these people. Evie remembers Jon being a quiet guy. He was the one nursing a beer in the corner. And not funny. He was not the funny one. A nice enough guy, but his friend was the funny one. When Jon got the gig on The Daily Show years ago, Evie was like, “Jon Stewart? He’s not funny.” [laughs] She likes to lord that over me. “Oh, I knew him long before Stephen did.”
PLAYBOY: Is it true you met Stewart for the first time while asking him a question at a press conference?
COLBERT: Yeah, that was it. I’d been doing The Daily Show when Craig Kilborn was hosting. I heard they were doing a press conference to announce that Jon was the new host, and I said, “Isn’t that the sort of thing we should be covering?” So I went, sat down in the audience and raised my hand when they opened it up to questions. I was like, “Stephen Colbert, Daily Show.” Oh God, how did I phrase it? “Does this announcement have any effect on the prospects of me getting the hosting job?” Jon looked at Doug Herzog, who was the network president at the time and is again, and said, “You said he wasn’t funny.”
PLAYBOY: Are you and Stewart friends or just friendly?
COLBERT: We’re actually friends.
PLAYBOY: When it’s just the two of you, do you talk about politics?
COLBERT: Not politics specifically, but we’ll talk about the news. We also talk about our families. We talk about anything friends talk about. That’s grown over the years. I’m an ardent admirer of his. I would say the thing that has kept me from being as good a friend to Jon as I would like is just that I am such a fan. I am gobsmacked by his abilities. But that being said, we go out to dinner, and we sometimes pick up the phone just to say, “How are you?” Or, “Do you mind if I tell you how I am? I had a shitty week.”
PLAYBOY: It can be shitty sometimes?
COLBERT: Rarely, but yeah, it happens. That’s another reason not to be tied to the news cycle. It’s damned depressing. I have no interest in behaving or thinking cynically. But it’s an easy trap to be cynical about anything, certainly when you’re talking about politics or the media.
PLAYBOY: Doesn’t comedy require a little cynicism?
COLBERT: Not really. I believe that people, more often than not, act with the best possible intentions. And when they don’t, that’s funny to me. That’s why comedy ends up seeming cynical, because you’re talking about the gap between what people say and what they do. You seem cynical because you’re always talking about that selfish behavior that’s dressed up as altruism. It doesn’t mean there isn’t altruism. It just means that it’s harder to make jokes about altruism.
PLAYBOY: There have been quite a few books written about you.
COLBERT: I heard that that exists.
PLAYBOY: There’s America According to Colbert, The Stewart/Colbert Effect, Colbert’s America: Satire and Democracy. The list goes on and on.
COLBERT: It’s all poison to me.
PLAYBOY: Poison? How is it poison?
COLBERT: Other people’s deconstruction of your motivations doesn’t help you do what you do. You can’t swallow and think about swallowing at the same time.
PLAYBOY: You don’t think about why a joke works or doesn’t work?
COLBERT: I do sometimes. Comedians dissect jokes all the time. Comedians are beautiful structuralists. But ultimately it’s an athletic endeavor. You have to be able to just hit the backhand. You can’t think about all the pieces of it. You can’t think about your swing. You just have to do it. Reading someone else’s deconstruction of what I do, all it does is put me in my head. On nights when the show goes particularly well, I am not aware of its fluidity. A lot of nights I’m just worried that I’m not going to be as good as the script in front of me.
PLAYBOY: You have more faith in the script than your own abilities?
COLBERT: There’s a great book called The Lyre of Orpheus by Robertson Davies, a Canadian writer. In it someone has written a symphony. It’s part of her doctoral thesis, and she brings it to a professor, who says, “Okay, I’ll let you know what I think.” He’s asked, “Don’t you want to hear it?”—there’s an orchestra at this school—and the professor says, “No. All an orchestra can do is get the notes wrong. I’ll play it perfectly in my head.” I understand what that means. When I look at a script for one of our shows, I’m playing it perfectly in my head. All I can do is fuck it up.
PLAYBOY: You recently extended your contract with Comedy Central through the end of 2014. Is it exhausting to think about doing The Colbert Report for another two years?
COLBERT: I try not to think about it in terms of years. You can’t do 161 shows. It can’t be done. All I can do is today and tomorrow and have some idea of what we’re doing next week. That’s all I can worry about. I have a script for today, I have probably half a script for tomorrow, and that’s as far down the road as I ever look. I know the mechanism of my show, and I know how it works. There’s a joy in that.
PLAYBOY: You’ve called the process of making The Colbert Report “the joy machine.”
COLBERT: It still feels that way. I have no fear of doing the show. I have no exhaustion in doing the show. I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. I can’t predict what we’ll be trying to make jokes about in the next six months. I don’t know what the next super PAC game will be for us or who will win the election. You can’t plan for any of that. If I thought I knew what was going to happen, it wouldn’t be worth doing. The challenge is how joyfully, with what sense of fun and adventure and playfulness, we will greet it. We don’t have to look for what the next thing will be. If experience is any judge, it’ll come flowing toward us like a river.