Ellen Gray: Late-night Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert to broadcast here starting tonight

THE COLBERT REPORT. 11:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday, Comedy Central.

IF STEPHEN Colbert is to be believed - and depending on where he's doing the talking, that's a big if - birth order matters.

On air, Comedy Central's Peabody Award-winning late-show host is a charming egotist, self-centered as a 2-year-old but with the slightly more exalted vocabulary of a cable demagogue.

Off air, he's more like that toddler's amused but definitely adult father, delighting in his child's spirit and stubbornness but never losing touch with reality while offering shrewd analysis of the 2-year-old's world view.

Or so I'm choosing to deduce from a frequently interrupted post-show phone interview last week conducted while Colbert, who's bringing "The Colbert Report" to the University of Pennsylvania's Zellerbach Theater starting tonight, was being driven home after a long day.

No wonder the guy warns viewers against reading.

The issue of birth order arose as Colbert was trying to explain why his show gets away with the kind of in-your-face product placement that's led to his trip here being dubbed "The Colbert Report: Doritos' Spicy Sweet Pennsylvania Primary Coverage from Chili-Delphia - The City of Brotherly Crunch!"

"I don't think Jon ['Daily Show' host Stewart] could get away with it. He'd be above it," Colbert said.

"For some reason, my character can get away with a lot. My character reminds me a lot of me in this way, in that I'm the youngest of 11 children. All my brothers and sisters used to say to me, 'You get away with everything.' "

Indeed he does.

As head of the "Colbert Nation," he regularly sends his fans on missions that include everything from editing errors into Wikipedia entries to affixing Peabody Award stickers to bags of Doritos still on store shelves to mark the show's April 2 win.

Does their willingness to obey his character's commands ever worry the real Colbert?

"No, that part I like," he said. "They are a mercenary army. I do not have entire control of them. I can suggest things for them to do, but I can't really turn them off. I can only turn them on, if you know what I mean."

That said, "I'm careful where I point them."

He's enthusiastic about the current Peabody stickers campaign.

"That's fantastic. We're not going to talk about that for a little while, because we're in Pennsylvania, but . . . there's some nice video out there of people plastering all the Doritos at a shop with the Peabody stickers," he said.

"I've actually been asked to sign a bag, with the Peabody sticker on it. It was pretty cool . . . I was in Buffalo, and someone walked up to me with a bag with a sticker on it, and I was so pleased to sign it," he said. "I love engaging the audience with a game and having them play along."

He'd prefer, though, that guests played it straight.

"I never want them to play along," he said. "I want them to play themselves. Too often people try to play along and then they're not themselves, they're not actually presenting their idea intellectually. They're not presenting their beliefs or making their arguments. They think they have to satisfy some need I have.

"But I say the same thing to everyone, which is, 'I'm ignorant, willfully ignorant, about what you're going to talk about. But I'm going to be passionate about it. Disabuse me of my ignorance with what you believe to be the truth of your belief or your book or your political position. Because that genuine resistance to my ignorance is where the comedy happens.' "

When "The Colbert Report" premiered in October 2005, it was generally understood that Colbert was portraying a conservative cable-news blowhard, a persona that appeared to owe more than a little to Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly.

Things aren't quite that simple anymore.

When I mentioned that he seemed to break character last week toward the end of an interview with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was at that point gushing about the real, not the faux Colbert, he said, "I loved her to death," then added, "Listen, the character's on a sliding scale. I dial it up and I dial it down, based on the feel of the guest.

"Sometimes there's a lot of resistance, or sometimes there's a particular idea that is worth my character embracing and us satirizing, or maybe there's something worth myself attacking and actually editorially embracing . . . But sometimes, you know, I figure we'll land in the middle. And I would say Albright kind of lands in the middle there. Because I don't want to be too aggressive against her, especially right now in a very fractured political season."

The problem for the faux Colbert, said the real one, is that he's "a great fan of conventional wisdom. He's not so much a fan of [President] Bush as he is a fan of monolithism. One overriding conventional wisdom and toeing the line on the laziest way of thinking. But, while there's still a lot of options, a lot of decisions being made, it's much harder to be a lazy thinker. I can't just say, 'OK, it's Clinton.' Or, 'It's Obama,' or, 'It's McCain.' There is not one monolithic power structure for me to get behind.

"That's going to shake out into two by this summer and one by next November, and our game will settle down. Right now I have to play the character far, far looser than I had to do during the beginning of the show."

Not that everyone's fully caught up.

"When the show started, everyone said, 'Oh, it's O'Reilly.' But every time we do a show like [the interview earlier this month with] R.E.M. or singing with John Legend or when I have a metaphor-off with Sean Penn or . . . the Green Screen Challenge or we run for president, when we do these things that are aberrant, I always say to my staff afterward, 'Remember, it's just like O'Reilly.' Because a year and a half ago, we really stopped doing O'Reilly's show. But that's still the take on our show," he said. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.