Stephen Colbert to get own show to follow The Daily Show. Good news, that, although it would be better news if I had cable.
Little-known fact about Stephen Colbert: He attended the hoity-toity Porter-Gaud School in South Carolina when one of its teachers was sexually molesting more than 40 of its male students. (And school leaders knew about it.) Colbert himself got caught up in it:
Stephen Colbert, a classmate and close friend of [victim Guerry] Glover’s then, remembers feeling sick to his stomach one day and being sent to [molester Eddie] Fischer’s office, which had a door and no windows.
“He checked me for a hernia. He said, ‘Turn your head and cough.’ And he was thorough. I’m 16, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘I just don’t see how it could be a hernia.’ But he’s the trainer. It was so clinical. He says, ‘No I don’t think it’s hernia. You know what, go to the nurse’s office and get an aspirin.'”
Colbert remembers an assembly during his senior year when someone went on stage and did an imitation of Fischer asking a boy to drop his pants. Everyone laughed. “There was no embarrassed hush.”
Colbert, a writer for The Daily Show on the Comedy Central channel, said that while the jokes were common, people didn’t really think that an older man might be having sex with boys. “They didn’t make that connection. There was the sense that ‘there’s crazy Mr. Fischer,’ not ‘Hey, that guy’s a pedophile.’
“But if this story is true, there is a large segment of people who live in downtown Charleston, who work with each other every day and share a common secret that they’re desperately trying to hide. There’s a tremendous wound in the community that has never been addressed.”