You know, I actually feel like making a serious comment on this matter after all.
Where to start. Well, for me Stephen Colbert has probably had more impact on my views and politics than any other person I can think of. I started watching his show in 2006, when I was in still middle school. Before that I was like any other kid who couldn't care about politics and that which I heard about just made me depressed. But one day I was just flipping to Comedy Central and found his show and found him to be quite funny, even without most of the context for a lot of his jokes. Through humor, he introduced me to so much: politics, economics, how the news works, etc. Because of him I actually cared about all this crap and I tried to expand what I knew about these subjects. While I never really used him as a legitimate source of news, what he said got me to go out and think about these subjects on my own. After hearing about much of what he talked about, I often went out to look this stuff on my own and form my own opinions. I read Atlas Shrugged after hearing about in on his show (I hated it for the record). Whereas others have said Dave leaving Late Night is the end of an era, to me at least, this is the real end of an era. To me, he was a permanent fixture of my adolescence, always on my TV 4 nights a week (and a few reruns the next day). I have honestly seen probably +90% of all his shows. His White House Correspondence Dinner speech still ranks as one of the awkward and also awesome things he has done. While I am so happy to see him achieve greater success, it still feels weird that something that had such a strangely profound effect on my formative years is going away.
