[Not single-page] The Comedy Central star on his TV character’s clash with reality, the pain of losing his father and brothers at a young age, and his fear of bears:

“PLAYBOY: How did bears become a recurring motif on the show? Was it just to have something to talk about that wasn’t topical?

“COLBERT: For the very first show, we were trying to find something that had a repeatable structure. We had this bit called ‘ThreatDown,’ when he talks about the number one threat to America that week. We were considering another story, something from Florida about a Burmese python that had grown to 13 feet long and swallowed an alligator and the alligator had eaten its way out of the snake. It was a really crazy story with horrible pictures. Then a bear story came up that wasn’t as flashy, but we went with it. Partly because bears are very resonant to me, because I really do have a bit of a bear problem. And it just seemed like a richer fear to us. We always said that anything my character is concerned about qualifies as news. If he says bears are the number one threat to America, then that is the case.

“PLAYBOY: He’s justifying his own anxieties?

“COLBERT: Exactly. ‘I want to make you afraid of the things I’m afraid of.'”