James Warren attended an event where Stephen Colbert discussed his performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006. I’ve been fascinated by that performance since it happened, mainly due to Colbert’s audacity in wickedly satirizing the President and the press right in front of their faces. I’ve been dying to hear anything at all about what Colbert was thinking at the time, and Warren’s blog post delivers.

Here’s a snippet:

Tom Purcell, a Second City alum and the television show’s co-executive producer, explained the tactical rationale: Bush, he said, was the typical “Big Man” one might find in innumerable institutional settings. “We thought it was the Big Man. He hires somebody to make fun of him, and he chuckles. You see it at office Christmas parties. You say the boss is so cheap that….and he laughs and everybody laughs. That’s what we thought we were doing. They wouldn’t have brought us in if they didn’t know what jokes we did.”

If you missed it or want to watch it again, the full video of Colbert’s performance is available on Google Video.