I have been a fan of comedian Paula Poundstone for at least forty years.
She was always a money-in-the-bank guest on my radio shows (I have linked to two of those appearances below), and I’ve seen her perform in person many, many times. She can always be counted on to do two solid hours with no warmup act, and work the crowd better than most.
So, when I saw that Paula was going to be on Stephen Colbert’s show last month, I set the DVR. But when I watched her segment, while I enjoyed it, I was confused by a few things.
For one, Colbert introduced her from his desk but didn’t go over to greet her as she entered (it has become de rigueur for TV hosts to hug their incoming guests, or at the very least, shake hands). And when she was done, he didn’t invite her to his guest chair nor give her the affirming backslap or other physical action that would have indicated how he appreciated her being there.
To make matters worse, as you’ll see when you watch this video, the cameras cut away for reaction from audience members five separate times. That’s almost never done during a standup set unless there was some content that had to be cut out. But five times? It couldn’t have been because Paula was being political, because Colbert has been bashing Trump for nearly a decade.
Although, now that I think about it, perhaps an editing mandate did come down from the cowards at CBS/Paramount, who seem inclined to bend the subservient knee and even write an eight-figure check to the Orange Menace in order to get the company’s buyout by Skydance okayed by his corrupt minions.
Another possible explanation might be that Paula was going off on tangents, as she does in her live shows, and ran over the allotted time. But I doubt that because she has been doing spots on late night shows all the way back to Carson and Letterman (a combined 27 appearances with them), as well as pretty much every other nationally televised talk show, so she certainly knows how to fit her material into the predetermined runtime.
Here’s another tipoff that something odd occurred. The YouTube clip I’m embedding below is entitled, “If You Weren’t Here I’d Still Be Doing This.” That’s a line Paula has said on stage many times. But there’s no video of her saying it during the Colbert spot, so why would his social media people give it that title?
I can only conclude that Paula went to the Ed Sullivan Theater and recorded this segment on a night Colbert wasn’t there but his audience was. Then the whole thing was chopped down and shoehorned in to another night’s episode to fit a time constraint, with his intro and outro tacked on later.
If that was the case, I would have thought his producers and editors would’ve done a better job with the audience cutaways.
I can’t find any other explanation for this. If you do, please forward it to me.