Carell Gets Past First Base

Colbert answers his telephone in New York, where he is preparing for his "Daily Show" spinoff, "The Colbert Report," which will premiere in October on Comedy Central. Carell, he seems so nice, so normal. Could it be so?

"Yes, he is. Completely. There's nothing behind the mask. Nothing at all, actually. Take the mask off and there's just this . . ." Colbert makes a whooshing sound. "This echo."

Colbert worked alongside Carell at Second City, was in fact his understudy at the beginning. "My favorite scene of his that I understudied for, it was in a vet's office, a veterinarian, and Steve's character is talking about how he makes beef goobies, you know to hide the pill inside to feed his pet. Just that idea. Beef goobies. God, I loved that character."

(We're not getting anywhere, are we?) "No, I'll tell you he's hilarious. But it took me forever to get the people here to hire him." Here being Comedy Central's "Daily Show." Colbert, who was employed there first as a fake newsman, kept saying "trust me. He makes anything funny. He looks straight. He's this oddly normal person, for comedy. It wasn't until they saw the clip."

The clip. It's from the brief seven-episode run of "The Dana Carvey Show" in 1996 -- a sketch Colbert and Carell did called "Waiters Nauseated by Food."

"There are no jokes in the scene," Colbert says. "I come on and read the specials. Like warm baby corn chowder and spinach salad with warm bacon dressing. Everything was warm, with chunks. A slightly warm fish in a chunky cheese sauce." During the scene, both the waiters are fighting back dry heaves as Colbert reads the specials. Carell never says a word. (You can find the bit by Googling "waiters nauseated food.") It is apparently a classic.

"I'm telling the Comedy Central people this guy is the back waiter in the skit. He's the one who comes in at the end and throws up, and they're like, finally, hire him. We want that guy," Colbert says. "He's a great understander of bits and how to heighten them."

Good stuff. So what else, what else should we know about Steve Carell?

One imagines Colbert scratching his chin. Then: "He's a very hairy man," he says. "Very hairy."

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Back in his trailer, Carell recalls that he pitched the idea for "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" to Judd Apatow, when the two worked together on Will Ferrell's "Anchorman." The genesis was a bit Carell did for Second City, where a guy is playing poker with his pals and they're all dishing about their sexual exploits, and the virgin character is piping up banalities like, "yeah, hot," but then starts describing how a woman's breasts feel like a bag of marbles and how when you rub around in their netherworld it's like baby powder, and of course, they bust him.

"And we started thinking what would this guy's life be like? A middle-aged virgin," says Apatow. They didn't want the virgin to be some kind of Pee-wee Herman. "We wanted people to relate to his feelings. Like, we've all been there, and it's okay." Like, he's a normal, nice guy who just had some bad half-starts at sex, missed his bus, and then decided not to travel at all.