50THE COLBERT REPORT - TIE

Aired: COMEDY CENTRAL, 2005-Present

“Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.” That was Stephen Colbert’s mantra when The Colbert Report debuted, and he has hardly wavered. Spun off from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where Colbert was a star correspondent, The Colbert Report is of a piece with The Daily Show, except that Colbert is more deeply in character than Stewart. Segments like “Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger,” or “The Word” require the writers not only to inhabit Colbert’s faux-reactionary voice but conform to his character’s twisted logic. “Everything we do on the show, they’re all arguments,” Rich Dahm, the show’s co-executive producer, told Written By. “We don’t just do monologue jokes, obviously. We’re hashing out an argument.”

A look inside the writers’ room of The Colbert Report