You might want to see this.

Tuesday night, Stephen Colbert had a very funny segment with someone pretty famous. We're not going to say who, because, really, does it really matter? Colbert sometimes just has those "On" nights, where all the jokes land and everyone is in the mood and the guest gets totally schooled while trying to one-up Colbert with trivia questions about the novelizations of those Peter Jackson movies that James Franco read last semester.

Damnit. Okay, fine, the guest was James Franco. BUT IT IS STILL WORTH WATCHING.

Well, that about sums it up. James Franco admits to being a fraud, kind of also admits to hating NASCAR, tries a sad little Steinbeckian diss on Colbert because he is now starring in Of Mice in Men on Broadway (Seriously? As George? George??), and makes terrible metaphors about his education using source material from: a) a child's book; b) one of the most famous movies of all time and c) a movie he currently stars in.

Stephen Colbert read the script from America's collective consciousness, James Franco smiled with his dimples, and everyone who cared felt like maybe they could just let it go now...

This man makes more money than Charlie Rose.

– Ashton Kutcher made $24 million last year. Sure, it's not entirely from Two and a Half Men. (After all, he only gets $700,000 per episode). The rest is savvy tech investments, but still. That like seven Lena Dunham books!

– Remember how ex-Housewife Jill Zarin was like "I didn't even want to be on that toxic program," and we were like, "Sure, Jill." Well, it turns out Bravo maybe wants her back and she's gonna make them sweat. (For approximately three seconds before accepting, obviously.)

– Lena Dunham went on Twitter to apologize about a string of tweets she exchanged with B.J. Novak and Mindy Kaling about which (alleged) serial killers they should go as for Halloween. Memphis killers were fine, but Ms. Dunham's suggestion was Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. "I'll be the sister they murdered," she wrote. Now she is sorry she wrote that, but Mindy and B.J. are not sorry for what they wrote, because they do not have to spend all their time apologizing to angry mobs the way the Girls star does.

– Annie Leibovitz dressed Stephen Colbert up like Eugène Delacroix for Vanity Fair. Here's an adorable little film they made behind the scenes, where literally the only interaction they could use was Ms. Leibovitz introducing herself to the anchorman and then saying "Nice to meet you" afterward.

Colbert and Oprah: Deathmatch! (OWN)

Last night Stephen Colbert and his wife Evelyn "Evie" McGee-Colbert had Oprah over at Evie's parents' 150-year-old home in Charleston for the latest installment of Oprah's Next Chapter. (Which is really good! Have you guys watched the Rihanna one yet? Get on that!)

We learned so much about Mr. Colbert, who lately seems to be distancing himself from his Stephen Colbert "character" more and more (in case people were still confused); first by speaking at Fordham with Cardinal Dolan, and then going on the mother of all talk shows to discuss everything from his family's death in a terrible plane crash to his influence on the presidential elections.

Stephen on playing Colbert:
http://youtu.be/zL-RHWusyp4
Mr. Colbert on the White House Correspondents' Dinner ("He didn't cross the line!")
http://youtu.be/k0ah704v9Gc
See, this is all Jon Stewart's fault.

The real influence of a fictional character:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uep1yOoTV-s&feature=share&list=UUKBnlTTgEnhIXv_c4LvvyMQ

Stephen Colbert has a wife ... sorry, world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOmsvZZ3f10&feature=share&list=UUKBnlTTgEnhIXv_c4LvvyMQ
And on a serious note, how the death of his father and two brothers when he was 10 affected his outlook on life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqkOHxydOFc&feature=share&list=ULgqkOHxydOFc
Did anyone else start tearing up when Stephen Colbert started talking about his "secret name"? Yeah, us either. We just have terrible allergies.

- Rob Lowe, Stephen Colbert, and the cast of Modern Family will be filling in for Robin Roberts on Good Morning America this week while the ABC host undergoes a bone marrow transplant. Hey, we'd take a soggy piece of bread over last week's substitute, Jessica Simpson.

- Would you like to go bowling with Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, Denis O'Hare, John Oliver, and not one but two stars of a Law&Order franchise? Of course you do. We don't even need to mention that the whole thing's for charity. You were already sold.

- Candace Bushnell keeps having to resettle the same old lawsuit with former manager (and alleged Stanford inspiration) Clifford Streit. She keeps giving him money for his part in helping her get Sex and the City on HBO, and he keeps telling her its not enough. She should just stop and ask herself, WWCBD?

-Alec Baldwin's dream Portlandia role: "A meat salesman with all kinds of charts and graphs of the loins and the sections of the pig and the cow and the organs." Just no pig, please...we're keeping kosher this week.

Filmmaker Alison Klayman with Ai Weiwei. (Ted Alcorn)

Since the launch of his incendiary blog in 2005, Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist-cum-social-media-genius, has been raising eyebrows and turning heads worldwide for his subversive stabs against Beijing's iron fist. He has launched a sort of neo-cultural revolution in China, breathing new power into the voice of the individual and bringing himself under the wrath of the Chinese government. And thanks to Alison Klayman, the 27 year-old filmmaker whose first documentary, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, hit movie screens nationwide this week, Weiwei might soon be as much of a household name in America as Warhol.

The Observer caught up with Ms. Klayman this week near her apartment in Morningside Heights. She looks young, and more like a fresh-faced Columbia student on her way to class than a filmmaker who might be on her way to winning an Oscar. But, when she starts talking, it all makes sense: you can tell this girl is serious business, an up-and-coming artist in her own right, and one to keep our eyes on.

Congratulations on the film. How does it feel?

It's totally wild. I certainly could never have anticipated or expected how it all turned out. With Sundance we felt like we had arrived, and now we get to this point, when the general public can come and see the film in theaters. It's crazy.

How did you find yourself in this position of being right out of college, stumbling upon this opportunity where you are following and filming Ai Weiwei everywhere?

Well, I think it's definitely one of those impossible to replicate situations. I went to China after I graduated from Brown in 2006. I went there without having any China background. I didn't speak Mandarin. And I didn't really know anyone. But with everything, it's, like, that intention was there.

That's pretty ambitious with Mandarin!

I wanted to learn the language, and I thought that that was maybe how I would make it as a journalist, to go abroad and do some kind of foreign correspondence. So, I did a lot of radio journalism, I worked in movies, and I found all kinds of crazy jobs ...

What was your weirdest job?

Let's see. I was a personal assistant to a very, very famous Chinese actress, Liu Yifen, who nobody here has heard of. She was staring in n a Jet Li and Jackie Chan movie. So, I have a lot, a lot of pictures of me with Jackie Chan. And that's how I learned a lot of my Mandarin, being on set.

So, how did you get to finally meet Ai Weiwei?

My roommate was working at a photography center which was run by a younger artist who had been very influenced by Weiwei, and who had heard of Weiwei's New York photographs from the '80s. He got boxes and boxes of negatives of Weiwei's never-processed [that] totally captured his imagination. So, the studio asked Weiwei to do a show. [My roommate would] bring home these thick binders of contact sheets and I got to flip through them when I was home. Being someone who had spent a lot of time in New York, and thinking about these young Chinese artists here in the 1980s—which is the perfect moment to be nostalgic about New York, with the grit and the protest and the punk—the photos were super, super fascinating.

I had just bought a camera in the fall of 2008 and really wanted to do video work and I was starting on a couple of projects. My roommate said that it would be great to have video to go along with the New York photographs exhibition. I did it totally for spec, nobody paid me; I signed a deal with the gallery that said I could do a 20-minute video and keep my own footage. So, I just showed up one morning, Weiwei came into the office, and the gallery staff said, "This is Allison, she's going to make a video for the show."

He didn't ask for credentials, which is good, because I didn't have any. The next few weeks filming together, we got along really well. Plus, we were covering a lot of topics, like law and censorship, that didn't really fit into the film I needed to make for the show. I knew that I had to use the material for something else. He was so fascinating and I wanted to know more about him. Even with his demeanor alone, you just want you watch him. I felt like doing a piece that was more about political stuff about China, and I really wanted to see how that was going to play out.

So, did you say something like, "Look, I want to stay with you and film you?"

It was more that I would always ask to come back the next time. "Is it alright if I come back around the anniversary of the earthquake and see what you guys came up with?" "Oh yeah, you can come." I thought that a certain project looked interesting, or that I could film something about this or that work.  Sometimes he knew there was a purpose, and sometimes maybe it wasn't so clear. It wasn't until sometime in fall 2009, when he introduced me to someone and said, "That's Allison. She's going to make a documentary, she has been filming with me for a long time."

Was he comfortable being filmed, since he's a sort of auto-documentarian himself?

I think I was really lucky, because he had done so much filming of himself. I never experienced that moment when the camera turned on and you feel someone kind of change. I think he had already gotten past that. Also, I wasn't working for him and I wasn't a journalist on a short stint. I lived in Beijing, so I would just come by in my spare time, until it reached the point where I started full-time working on this, because I wanted to go on trips at a moment's notice with Weiwei. I was learning how impulsive he was. I wanted to see it off correctly.

As you were working more with Weiwei, do you feel like you were becoming a dissident by proxy?

I feel like there definitely was a transformation over time. When it started I certainly didn't think Weiwei was even a dissident. I thought dissident was an inappropriate label for him, which people were starting to use in 2009 out of convenience—people would love to shorthand this idea of the dissident artist, and I was not sure if he was there yet. I felt like I had to bring a really heavy dose of skepticism. Here's this world famous artist, who is traveling and earning lots of money. Who is asking him to speak for them?

More than anything, I thought the film was an examination of this guy's character, and that through it you would see a lot of new things about China, because I felt that I was already thinking new things about China just by meeting him. I had never met anyone who talks about China like Weiwei does.

But is is not that classic story of the dissident being silenced, because that was not what I was seeing. He was saying all these things very freely, everyday, and giving interviews, and going online, and traveling the world.
But with his detention in 2011, it feels more like the classic story of the dissident.

Yes, I really have seen a tremendous change and tightening and crackdown and these spaces for people to express themselves and push things forward have gotten smaller in China.

And in the end, it's even more complex; but it also has become simplified, because you have people who have been saying, "Oh this guy is going to get detained for the things he is saying and the kind of work he does." However, it is not because he is an artist that he is being detained. It's not because he dropped a Han Dynasty urn in a photograph or gave Tiananmen the finger. It's because of the way he is speaking and using social media. That's the point. He is an artist who is determined to reach beyond just the art world or art works. He wants to communicate. And so if that's through an interview with Time magazine or a Tweet, then fine, because he's just trying to reach more people.

Speaking of the role of the artist, how has working with Weiwei made you think differently about art and yourself as an artist, especially so early in your career?

I think with this whole experience, I got to feel it from two sides. First, it was learning from Weiwei and his example. I saw how his art is about more than himself, how it's about encouraging people to find their voice.

But also, I've gotten to create a film. And that's my work. I'm getting to see how it's impacting people, and it's something that is getting a lot of attention in that way. So, maybe a week after seeing the film, something will come up when people will ask themselves, "What would Weiwei do in this situation?" Maybe they'll be a little more bad ass, a little more outspoken, a little more fearless or feel compelled that they shouldn't be silent about something.

Ai Weiwei is pretty badass in China, but what about artists here, working without the threat of government crackdown?

The challenges just manifest themselves differently. Here, you're not under an authoritative regime, but you just feel like you can't accomplish something, either because there is the status quo that feels too entrenched, or interests that feel much more powerful than you, or you believe that there is too much apathy. There are all of these forces that could keep you or keep me from even just expressing something just because for all these reasons, you don't think it will work.

So which artists do you look to here who you feel like are doing really important work, Weiwei sort of work?

I believe that there are a lot of artists locally and around the States who are doing these things. But when I think of someone in the US who is doing something like Ai Weiwei, my answer is actually Steve Colbert! I say him, because I feel that comedy is in the category of the arts.

Yes, your documentary shows that Weiwei is really, really funny.

Totally, and that's why I think that Weiwei and Colbert are very, very similar in what they are doing through their art. Colbert's character is entertaining, which is something meant to draw you in. And Weiwei's work does the same: he has naked photos of himself, photos of himself jumping, silly things. It is because that's who he is and he also knows that's how you relate to people. But what Colbert is doing with the Super PAC work is just like Weiwei in that he is going through the system to show us exactly how it operates. He has a lawyer, Trevor Potter, showing how you go about the paper work, how to collect money. This is something that is of vital importance to our campaign finance system, which is of vital essence to our democracy. And the reason I watch the show, is because it is engaging and feels relevant, and it is about transparency in the system, just like Weiwei's work.

Does Ai Weiwei ever watch Colbert?

No, but I always tell him to!  I think Weiwei would get him. He has a really good sense of humor.

But the system is not trying to detain Colbert.

Yeah, there's the difference!

And you must be making the Chinese system pretty nervous yourself.

I guess so. But I wonder at what level it would take for reporters to ask about the film at a foreign ministry briefing. It hasn't reached that level yet. But maybe an Oscar nomination. Or, actually, maybe it would have to be a win!

Do you think you'll send a copy to Jackie Chan?

No, no copy. I just wish he'd go see it.

And where are you going after this?

It's hard to say what the next thing is just yet, but I think about it a lot. Whatever comes next, whether it's a short work or another documentary or a series or a screenplay, whatever it is, it's going to tie back to this somehow: with freedom of expression or the impact that art has.

And do you think we'll be seeing Weiwei at the Oscars?

My dream is to have Ai Weiwei at the Oscars, obviously, Wouldn't that be everyone's dream? I told him, "You've gotta get a tux!"

What is he like in person?

He's pretty intimidating at first, especially if he doesn't like you. I wouldn't want to be in the wrath of Weiwei. But he's so much fun. If he were here he'd say lets go here and here and try that and that. He's fun. He always shows you a good time.

egogolak@observer.com

And apparently he's not the only fan-boy. Slate podcast downloads "typically reach five to six figures per episode."

General interest papers like The Boston Globe are abandoning podcasting—waste of time and resources, they say—publications with narrow audiences and opinion-driven content like Slate can make a killing, reports Nieman. Brand mentions in Slate podcasts are the most expensive ads the company sells and have the highest sell-through rate.

"What makes it work is not a groundbreaking format but an expertly arranged mix of personalities: editor David Plotz and writers Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson have an infectious rapport,"  Andrew Phelps wrote.

Producers sent a note to audience members yesterday apologizing for the last-minute cancellation and citing "unforseen circumstances."

(Email screencap via Twitter user @benlai91)

An unexpected cancellation is extremely unusual for Stephen Colbert, who has hosted the show with the flu and in a cast. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has been cancelled on short notice twice, once when Mr. Stewart's child was born and once when a show staffer died unexpectedly. The radio silence from Team Colbert and Comedy Central is ominous, but given Mr. Colbert's past antics, it could also mean he's gotten up to an incredible campaign stunt. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Update: The Huffington Post reports that Mr. Colberg's mother, 91, has fallen seriously ill.

[via Mediaite]

If only if the rest of government worked this way

Bad news first: Stephen Colbert has put an end to his bid for president of South Carolina by disbanding his exploratory committee, as he announced last night.

Good news: He can now regain power of his super PAC, after running through a messy gauntlet with its current gatekeeper (but in no way associate) Jon Stewart.

Even better-best news: According to an F.E.C. filing made at 12:01 this morning, the political action committee--which during the regime change two weeks ago renamed itself "The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC" but has since returned to its "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow"...though it's easier to just say Colbert's Super Pac--has raised $1,023,121.24.

The New York Times lists of some of the celebrity and organizations that are named as donors for the committee, though no one, not even Hot in Cleveland star Laura Sangiacomo or former West Wing hottie Bradley Whitford, has confirmed that they put money into the organization that released videos encouraging people to vote for Herman Cain after he dropped out of the race.

While we're glad to have gotten a lesson on how super PACs work, we're wondering where that million plus bucks is going now that it's back in Colbert's control. Though lord knows he fought long and hard for it last night; wresting control from a reluctant Mr. Stewart in a showdown that could only be described with the phrase "We have no words."

Jon Stewart's "Moment of Zen"

Stephen Colbert's response:

And it looks like Mr. Colbert is already taking back control of his Super PAC's website via newsletter:

Dear Super PAC Nation,

For those of you holding your breath for the past few weeks, you may exhale. For those of you who did not survive holding your breath: You did not die in vain. Because I, Stephen Colbert, have regained control of Colbert Super PAC.

Earlier tonight, I confronted Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and chased him all the way to The Colbert Report, in the most action-packed TV crossover since that time Urkel guest-starred on Full House.

The way I see it, the Supreme Court said that money is speech, and Jon Stewart was hogging all my speech. Now I've taken that speech from Jon, making him like that movie "The Artist": French.

At midnight, Colbert Super PAC will be filing our financial details with the Federal Election Commission. If you're not currently one of the three Democrats or three Republicans on the F.E.C., you can read about it in the press release below.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to spend some quality time with my money.

Stephen Colbert
Ex-President and President
Colbert Super PAC

And here's the press release:

Colbert transfers his super PAC powers to Jon Stewart

Tonight, Stephen Colbert had some big news to share with America: since he was announced to be polling ahead of presidential candidate Jon Huntsman in South Carolina, he had decided to form an exploratory committee to become president of the United States...of South Carolina.

There was only one hitch.

Back in September, Mr. Colbert's joke-super PAC was real-approved by the FEC. Unfortunately, you can't have a super PAC and run for president, as Mr. Colbert's lawyer told him on the show, because that would be considered "coordinating with yourself." (This was once explained in a Colbert Super PAC Ad featuring Buddy Roemer, but sometimes we need to be reminded how the government works.)

Forced to make a decision, the recent New York Times Magazine cover model handed off his committee to his former coworker (and bagel/travel agency business partner) Jon Stewart, whose first act as president of the Colbert Super PAC was to change its name to "The Definitely Not Coordinating with Stephen Colbert Super PAC."

Tellingly, the Colbert super PAC website has yet to change its name, though it does now have an opening letter from Mr. Stewart.

The punchline, of course, is that this is all actually legal, and that candidates use super PACS (which can raise unlimited amounts of money by getting donations from corporations and unions as well as individuals) as their own personal campaign machines all the time now. And as we learned tonight (or already knew!) you can still be close associates, friends, and/or business partners with the person in charge of the political action committee, as long as you aren't "coordinating."

We'd be outraged...except that we really want to see Mr. Colbert enter into the 2012 race.

Later, when asked if he'll run for mayor, Weiner says, "perhaps." So coy that congressman.