For me, improvisation is about working with a partner. That is much easier to do in the interview, because you have a sounding board.

If Germans are happy it means everyone else is miserable.

My guest Newt Gingrich shut down the government during the Clinton administration. I'll ask him when it's gonna start working again.

I like talking about people who don't have any power and it seems like some of the least powerful people in the United States are the migrant workers who come and do our work and don't have any rights as a result. And yet we still invite them to come here, and at the same time ask them to leave.

Knock Knock. Who's there? The Truth. No joke.

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.

Twenty-two astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" - Stephen Colbert to Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, "The Colbert Report," November 3, 2005