Udi's Granola puts Stephen Colbert on notice

By Tyler Nemkov Thu., Mar. 26 2009 at 2:00 PM

Categories: Food for Thought

Mr. Stephen Colbert, you are officially on notice.

Yes, I know that it's really Colbert's thing to put people (or items like caramel apples) "on notice," but the tables have been turned, thanks to the Granola Tycoon (aka Eric Clayman), who makes granola for Udi's Handcrafted Foods.

Here's the skinny on the granola story:

Since 2007, Udi's has been placing an ad in HEEB magazine, a contemporary Jewgazine in Brookly, that shows photoshopped Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad enjoying some of Udi's simple, fantastic granola.

This summer, when Colbert was mock-unhappy about Jon Stewart covering the Democratic National Convention in Denver, he offered a diatribe about this city, calling it a place filled with granola-snarfing, mile high hippies.

Clayman responded by promptly mailing granola to Colbert, along with the ads from HEEB. And what happened next? "My wife and I watch the show almost every evening," Clayman says. "One night the two of us were sitting there and my jaw dropped, because we saw him using a joke so incredibly similar to our ad, I mean even down to the language down on the tag line."

Take a look at the Udi's ad on the right, then Colbert's rendition on the left.

This was obviously no coincidence, so Clayman left a few challenging posts on both Heeb's website and Colbert's site.

"I don't wanna come off as a guy who is trying to stick it to him," Clayman says. "I just want to have fun with him. I'm a huge fan, he's hilarious. He usually puts people 'on notice' -- people don't do it to him."

Claymore has yet to hear back from Colbert, even though he sent his producers "another case of granola and another copy of HEEB," he says. "We'll see where it goes from there."

Colbert, you're on notice!