Montrealer Barry Julien has won a Peabody award for his work on The Colbert Report. Here's how he got there. And interestingly, in some ways, he thinks of his work as journalist-like.

From the Nov. 1 Globe and Mail:

Julien began his career at 17, as an amateur magician. “I think if you're a big enough nerd, you have to do magic in high school, and I was well beyond the threshold,” he explains. His interest in magic led him to standup comedy, and he soon started performing at Montreal's Comedy Nest. Listening to the first joke he ever wrote and performed, it's amazing they allowed him to come back. “I'm not feeling too good tonight,” he had said. “I just got kicked out of a one-man band.”

Julien's introduction to political comedy occurred the first time he read The Onion, the satirical newspaper he discovered at Montreal's Just for Laugh's festival. “It was like a magic trick. I couldn't figure out how they were doing what they were doing,” he says. “There was this feeling that whoever is writing this has insight that I don't have. And that drives me nuts.”

To figure it out, he enrolled in communications at Concordia University (where he met his wife, filmmaker Jennifer Kierans), took a screenwriting class, and began studying the collected Seinfeld scripts.

Through a manager, he began getting work writing for such animated shows as Little Lulu and Animal Crackers, and the camp sitcom Big Wolf on Campus. Then, in 2003, he got his first crack at political-joke writing, going to work for CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes. He spent three seasons there, producing an “ass-load of jokes” including a bit about something he called Herpeflauge, a medication that does not cure your herpes or treat it in any way, but makes your symptoms invisible.

He also began applying for jobs at American TV shows, sending material to The Daily Show, Late Night with Conan O'Brien and Fox's Talk Show with Spike Feresten, where he worked briefly before getting hired at The Colbert Report. In May, 2007, he started work for Comedy Central, just weeks after watching an episode in which Colbert challenged actor Sean Penn to a “meta-free-phor-all,” a metaphor contest judged by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

“It was an absolutely dazzling piece of comedy, one of the greatest things I've ever seen,” he says. “I remember walking outside with the dog and thinking ‘I'm not good enough.' ” Despite his doubts, Julien quickly began getting material on the show, but would go home each night to read the news – a Canadian kid cramming for an ongoing exam on American politics and pop culture.

Like The Daily Show and the best political moments of Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, he believes, is successful because it is factual about the news, letting the jokes flow from actual events and public statements. “We have to be accurate, or else we're not funny,” he says. “I think some trust has been earned by the shows.”

Each morning, the writing staff – whom he describes as a collection of misanthropes, outsiders, “nerdlingers” and former magicians – pours over newspapers and refers to an extensive database of recorded newscasts. He remembers one day spent in his office with two other writers, tracking who had been hired and fired from the justice department under the controversial reign of former attorney-general Alberto Gonzales. “It was like we were doing investigative journalism,” he says. “That's what I love about my job: that I get to try and figure out these complex things that most people don't have the time to sift through.”