Daily Show/Colbert Report EP Rides the Vespa of Success

We missed this one in the exhaustive crush of pre-Oscars stories. Ben Karlin, former Onion writer and current executive producer of The Daily Show and Colbert Report — the yang to Jon Stewart‘s yin — was profiled by the Times last week. And hidden inside the paper’s ubiquitous “everyman” gushing (“favors jeans and boots in winter and shorts and flip-flops in summer”) was the revelation that rather than ask Comedy Central for a car service or limo to shuttle between the shows’ separate studios on the West side, he got them to finance a scooter.