Colbert spoke in the persona of the character he played on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report", a parody of a conservative pundit in the fashion of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. He began by satirizing mass surveillance, joking "If anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Someone from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail." While many of his jokes were directed at President Bush, he also lampooned the journalists and other figures present at the dinner. Most of the speech was prepared specifically for the event, but several segments were lifted—largely unchanged—from "The Colbert Report", including parts of the "truthiness" monologue from the first episode of the show, where Colbert advocated speaking from "the gut" rather than the brain and denounced books as "all fact, no heart". Colbert framed this part of the speech as though he were agreeing with Bush's philosophies, saying that he and Bush are "not brainiacs on the nerd patrol", implicitly criticizing the way Bush positioned himself as an anti-intellectual.