Colbert: The College years

Twenty years later, the 'poet/jerk' will be Northwestern Homecoming honcho

With Stephen Colbert leading the way, Friday's Homecoming Parade at Northwestern University is sure to be a celebration that any student could enjoy.

Except maybe a few artsy theater snobs.

Like the one Colbert used to be.

"I was a real poet-slash-jerk," the star of Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" said of his collegiate self. "You know, I had a beard, and I wore black, and I was really willing to share my grief with you."

While the ill-informed, right-wing buffoon he plays on TV is said to be a Dartmouth alum, the real Colbert graduated from Northwestern in 1986 and was never much for school spirit. The parade gig cracks up his former college sweetheart, Ayun Halliday, "because I can't imagine that we ever went to the Homecoming Parade, or Homecoming, or a single football game. He was not a fraternity boy."

Back then, he seemed destined not to play the fool, but to play Hamlet.

"He was masculine and intelligent and radiated his intelligence," Halliday said. "He had a certain gravitas that he could get across onstage."

Or when playing Dungeons & Dragons, Colbert's nerdy campus diversion of choice.

The TV It Boy was too busy to talk this week, but in a 2003 Sun-Times interview he reminisced about living in the historic Frances Willard dorm and acting in plays a world apart from his current late-night shtick.

"My senior year I did 'Pelleas and Melisande,' which was this proto-Jungian fable by Maurice Maeterlinck," he said. "Incredibly dull!"

His role in the 1892 psychological drama, Colbert later realized, was way beyond the reach of a 21-year-old novice. "I had no conception of what to do. All I knew was that my character had really broad shoulders, so they made me a pour-foam chest. God, I wish I still had it! I'd wear it to bed at night."

Costumes seem to have been a strong suit. "He once borrowed my purple harem pants to play Othello in acting class," Halliday recalled.

Now an author (No Touch Monkey!) based in New York and married to someone else, Halliday has been amused seeing her date to a Grateful Dead concert spruced up as the consummate nitwit conservative. Colbert was very much a part of the school's incestuous theater crowd, she said -- "but he was never pretentious."

A transfer student from Virginia's all-male Hampden-Sydney College, he made an impression as that pervasive '80s stereotype, the preppy.

"It's like he was born in the blue blazer with the khaki pants," said another NU classmate, Anne Libera, now a top teacher at Second City. "Although when he was dating Ayun, she's such a hippie girl and she would try to make him over. I have this vivid memory of him going into, like, an hourlong rant about how much he hated hummus."

Colbert started dabbling in comedy as part of No Fun Mud Piranhas, an all-NU improv team in the early days of ImprovOlympic. Most of those long-ago players are a fuzzy memory for Charna Halpern, the IO boss then and now, but not Colbert. "He was always topical and smart," she said, "and that's what I loved about him."

Today, with his satire of D.C. doings and his off-putting interviews with congressmen, the man who popularized the term "truthiness" is getting a reputation as a master political wit -- "the age's semiofficial pundit," Newsweek called him. He shocked insiders in April by bluntly mocking President Bush in a monologue before the man himself.

Beltway mischief wasn't much on his mind 20 years ago, but the analytical wheels already were spinning. "What Stephen was always interested in was not so much politics as it was hypocrisy and extreme points of view and the way in which people behave in extreme situations," Libera said. "In our world [today], that's where it is: in the political spheres."<

After graduation he waited tables in Chicago (at Scoozi, among other places) and sold furniture he made himself -- "horrible, horrible futon frames," Colbert said, "that fell apart on people in the middle of the night and left jagged bits of wood and 4-inch, razor-sharp zip screws sticking into their mattresses."

He got work at Second City but kept quitting, convinced he belonged in serious drama. "In my mind I had a loft with only a steaming samovar as my furniture -- an incredibly self-important, pretentious person," he said. "But people kept paying me to do comedy, and I kept having a wonderful time, and I finally just surrendered to it."

Darel Jevens (djevens@ suntimes.com), once a pretentious Northwestern journalism jerk, graduated a year after Colbert.