Things I Learned About Stephen Colbert...

...watching Frank Rich interview him at the 92nd Street Y tonight.

1)He does a great Bill O'Reilly impression -- and I'm not talking about the O'Reilly-inspired character he does on The Colbert Report.

Recounting the time he met the Fox News host at last year's Time 100 party, he re-created both O'Reilly's words and his voice: "Can I give you some advice? Watch who you book as guests. You can have Olbermann on, and you can have Franken on, but people see a pattern."

His theory on why O'Reilly agreed to be a guest on The Colbert Report: "I think he might be flattered by the doppelganger. He's got some sense of humor about himself."

2)He also does a pretty funny Henry Kissinger. "Somewhere in our tape library, there exists five solid minutes of me trying to convince Dr. Henry Kissinger to say, 'Where are my pancakes? I was promised pancakes.'...We got him to say it, but very quietly."

3)Even though he's mounting an annoyingly-ubiquitous run for president, he'd be happy to see someone else win: "I would love to see a President Huckabee because if our president were named 'Huckabee," how bad could anything really seem?... It'd be as if the entire country was animated by Hanna Barbera. Can you imagine the Huckabee Monument?"

4)He is a huge theater geek. After singing parts of two different songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, Colbert mused, "Wouldn't it be great if my character played Jesus? 'Wait, wait, wait. What's this crucifix part? I thought he was king."

Other highlights...

Colbert on the permanent state of war, post 9/11: "It's a crisis that has been defined into eternity. Are you awake? Then it's a crisis."

On being a journalist: "I couldn't do what you do. I couldn't care about this stuff and not get laughs. You must just weep all the time."

On being a journalist for a day, when he wrote Maureen Dowd's column (actually co-written with two members of his writing staff): "She didn't know I was going to run for president when she called me up. She said, 'How would you like to write my column this weekend?' And I said, 'Why?' And she said, 'Why did Tom Sawyer want that boy to paint his fence?'"

On stealing the microwave from the O'Reilly Factor green room: "No matter what Fox said to the Associated Press, they did not know. 'Well, it was all in good fun, they told us they were going to do it.' Bullshit!"

On whether he'll ever get burned out from doing The Colbert Report: "The show requires of me everything I know how to do, so it would take me a while to get tired of it."

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