Will Smith on The Colbert Report
This entry was posted on 7/2/2008 12:05 AM and is filed under Ephemera.
Long week, so I just put a bullet in the June 24 episode of
The Colbert Report, with Will Smith guesting to promote
Hancock, a rarity for Stephen Colbert's show. After an inspired opening segment bit in which he took Smith to task for being at the forefront of
Hollywood's "glorification of face violence" (his latest cause
du jour, after a mysterious injury last week that left him with a couple stitches between his eyebrows), Colbert mostly stuck to genial set-ups instead of jabs, asking Smith if his support of
Barack Obama was part of a conspiracy to eventually play him in a movie.
Smith, for his part, kept things equally light, laughing a lot and dipping back into
his Muhammad Ali accent for effect. Some self-effacing jokes about ears led to a shared fist bump, which was then mocked as
a terrorist fist jab. After a clip from the film, Colbert did seem to catch Smith on his heels a bit when he asked him
if the movie, about "a superhero using his power and the world getting mad at him for it," was a veiled metaphor about the United States and the events of the past half-dozen years.
