I cringed Wednesday night when Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert announced that freshman U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley (D.-Chicago) was his guest on that night’s pre-taped “Better Know a District” segment.

Colbert’s character is a blunt, occasionally clueless right-wing gasbag and in “Better Know a District” he conducts daffy interviews with members of congress that make them the butt of  his  jokes.  The risk of looking foolish is so high that three years ago, Quigley’s predecessor, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel,  famously advised his Democratic colleagues to decline invitations from Colbert.

But Quigley, who is my congressman on the Northwest Side, said he watches “The Colbert Report,”  appreciates its use of humor to address serious issues and figured that he’d seen so much goofiness in his 10 years as a member of the  Cook County Board of Comissioners that  Colbert wouldn’t throw him.

 The interview was Jan. 22 in Quigley’s Washington “office,” which was actually the House Judiciary Committee room decorated with Chicago and Quigley family artifacts.  It lasted about two hours, Quigley said, and the mood was light throughout.

But Quigley knew that Colbert and his editors would distill the conversation into about five minutes and so he was appropriately nervous when the segment aired.

He needn’t have been. Though Colbert had fun with Quigley — asking him, in light of the fact that Dan Rostenkowski and Rod Blagojevich had once held his seat, whether he’d yet picked out the federal prison where he wants to serve his time, for instance– and made him appear addled during an attempt at improv comedy, editors  left on the cutting room floor the portion of their chat where they spoke with Chicago-style hotdogs  in their mouths and where Quigley held a Blagojevich wig to his head.

Quigley even got a laugh, responding to one of  Colbert’s stranger pronouncements,  “You have a point. Not a good point, but a point.”

And, wisely, he refused Colbert’s invitation to sing “Sweet Home Chicago” for the cameras. 

“Embarrassing my district by singing would be the worst thing I could do,” he said.

“How do you hope to embarrass your district?” Colbert shot back.

Not by looking bad on “The Colbert Report,” I guess.

Watch from 9:40 to 14:40 in this full-episode link

Transcript below.