Though Allison Silverman briefly considering becoming a scientist, she eventually ended up majoring in humanities at Yale University. After graduating in 1994, she moved to Chicago to study with such comedy institutions as ImprovOlympic and the Second City Conservatory, the alma mater of future employer Stephen Colbert. During her graduation show at the Second City in 1996, she performed an original song called “These Are My Gandhi Years,” in which she sang about the trials of being poor and underfed as a struggling artist.
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Then she made a major career gamble, leaving a dependable writing post at Late Night to write for The Colbert Report, hosted by her one-time Daily Show colleague Stephen Colbert. As co-head writer with Richard Dahm since 2005 and a co-executive producer since September 2007, Silverman is largely responsible for much of Colbert’s fictional persona—including the idea for Colbert to strut around his desk as guests make their entrance over to the desk.
“That was my idea,” Silverman said. “For me, it felt like a strong statement of ego: that Stephen would be jealous of even that tiniest moment when his guests would be in the spotlight. So he diverts all of the attention—to himself.”
Is this something you’d recommend for humor writers—to start with improv comedy?
I was a humanities major, but it’s been mentioned by a few journalists that I was a molecular biology major—which I definitely was not. I do love science, though.
A “status shift” is about who controls the power in a scene. You see this in real life all the time. You see it with parents and kids; the parents are obviously in control, because they’re older and bigger, but when the kid throws a tantrum, the parents try to placate the child by giving them something. Now the kid is in control. That’s a status shift.
I once wrote a sketch on Late Night With Conan O’Brien that I liked because it dealt with some issues that were on my mind at the time.
