Q&A
Just Joking
Montclair resident Glenn Eichler writes for
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
WRITTEN BY CINDY SCHWEICH HANDLER PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHELE TOMASIK
G
30
BACK TO SCHOOL 2019 MONTCLAIR MAGAZINE
After that, I wrote for Beavis and
Butt-Head. Daria [the animated
sitcom Eichler co-created and pro-
duced] was a spin-off of that and a
cult favorite, which ended up being
good things.
YOU’VE WORKED WITH
STEPHEN COLBERT SINCE
THE BEGINNING OF HIS FIRST
SHOW, THE COLBERT REPORT . HOW
DID YOU CONNECT WITH HIM?
Glenn Eichler
with his Emmy
WHAT DID YOU DO AT MTV, AND
WHAT WAS IT LIKE WORKING THERE
IN ITS EARLY YEARS?
I was a promo writer, and then a
floating writer. I got to meet a lot of
celebrities. One year, Prince played
with his New Power Generation at
the Thanksgiving party. He played
just because he felt like it, and there
were a couple one hundred people
there; I was 20 feet away. I was also
there when we got a memo saying we
had to refer to Michael Jackson as the
King of Pop. He wanted to be called
the King of Rock, Pop and Soul, but
we negotiated him down to King of
Pop. He was the biggest artist in the
world at the time.
Here’s a lesson for the writers
out there. I was out of work for two
years after being steadily employed
my whole life. They were looking
for writers, and I had a meeting in a
tiny little coffee shop that was across
from the studio. When they offered
me a job, I was thrilled.
Stephen had been doing that
character on The Daily Show, which
we called a “high status idiot.” It was
originally modeled on Bill O’Reilly,
though we moved away from that
– he was a liberal playing a loud con-
servative. When the show premiered
in October 2005, a lot of reviewers
were positive, though they said “How
can he keep this up?” Everything
Stephen does is amazing. He’s a
really talented guy.
HOW DO YOU PUT TOGETHER
A NIGHTLY SHOW LIKE
THE COLBERT REPORT?
The writers would meet in the
morning and pitch stories. The execu-
tive producers and Stephen would
meet around 1 p.m., read aloud and
rehearse around 3 p.m. to see what
worked. Then we’d rewrite and tape
around 5 or 6 p.m.
REPORT:
lenn Eichler is used
to people telling him
that his work helps
keep them sane. It’s an
unusual compliment
considering he’s not a
therapist, but the Montclair resident
knows that the sentiment is real. As
a comedy writer for The Late Show
with Stephen Colbert, it’s his job to
make viewers laugh, allowing them to
decompress and let off steam after a
day of crazy-making headlines.
Eichler, who was born in the Bronx,
began sharing his humorous take on
events as a child, distributing his
self-produced newspaper, the Wykagyl
Wombat, in his New Rochelle neigh-
borhood. “I was 12 or 13, and my
dad would xerox four pages for me,
so the printing costs were low,” he
says. “There was no actual news in it,
just jokes.” At Syracuse University, he
majored in American Literature and
read “a lot of well-written stuff.” A
post-graduation job at a trade maga-
zine, Meeting News, gave him “a lesson
in what I didn’t want to do,” he says. “I
saw humor in it, but my bosses didn’t.”
As managing editor of National
Lampoon, the good news was that
he was expected to be funny; the bad
news was that the magazine was “in its
death throes,” he says. But MTV had
just started, they were looking for writ-
ers, and an enduring career in writing
for television was launched.
We talked to Eichler, who has also
authored three humor books, about
being funny on deadline, writing jokes
about the federal reserve and the non-
stop source material coming out of
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.