How did a nice girl from Penobscot end up getting regularly harassed by Stephen Colbert on national TV?

Meg DeFrancesco, 24, blames it on luck.

Good luck.

“The funny thing is, I just came here to work on Fashion Week. I brought a suitcase and crashed with a friend,” she said of her start in New York City nearly two years ago.

DeFrancesco, a 2001 graduate of George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, stayed, hoping to get her big break in the Big Apple. The gamble paid off. After a fortuitous September 2005 encounter with a production manager for the fledgling Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report,” DeFrancesco was hired to “wrangle interns” and assist the script supervisor. She has been working there since the week before the show’s debut, and plans to stay for the indefinite future.

“The atmosphere is just so great,” DeFrancesco said. “We’re like a really nice family. Everyone has the greatest sense of humor … It’s the kind of place you’re continually learning.”

Part of what DeFrancesco is learning is how to be comfortable in front of the camera as well as behind it. She has been getting lots of chances to show off her comic chops on the popular “Colbert Report” (pronounced by its hosts with silent Ts), which is a liberal-slanted spoof of political pundit programs and has received lots of media attention since its 2005 debut.

Colbert even skewered President Bush and mainstream American media when he was the featured entertainer at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. The performance was polarizing – some White House aides walked out on Colbert – and later became an Internet sensation.

“I don’t think there are Republicans here,” DeFrancesco wryly said of the show’s staff. “If there are, they don’t make themselves apparent.”

While “The Colbert Report” is a parody, it still packs a punch. The most knowledgeable Americans – who can correctly answer the most questions about current events – watch it and “The Daily Show,” the news parody that precedes it, according to a survey released recently by the Pew Research Center.

DeFrancesco is enjoying being a part of the report. She has a recurring character, “Meg the intern,” who periodically is pulled onstage by Colbert. Various hijinks ensue. Some highlights include the time that DeFrancesco led a choir of interns who barked their way through a Christmas carol, and the time that Colbert made her wear a burqa after the Democrats swept the 2006 elections. It’s a bit part, but a good one, and has even garnered Meg a mention in the Wikipedia Internet entry on “The Colbert Report.”

Recently Meg the intern fended off her boss’s advances during a sketch where the geeky but pompous Colbert tried to prove his suitability as a cover model for bodice-ripping novels.

DeFrancesco got big laughs from the audience as she reluctantly posed with Colbert, finally threatening to call her lawyer. The sketch was edgy and funny and faintly ridiculous – the perfect mix for “The Colbert Report.”

Her mother, Judy DeFrancesco of Penobscot, watched the segment at a friend’s house, because the family doesn’t have cable TV.

“It was funny,” she said. “But you want to say, ‘back off!'”

Despite her momentary protectiveness, Judy DeFrancesco has nothing but good things to say about Stephen Colbert the person – if not always his persona.

“I know that he’s really respectful to women,” she said. “He doesn’t have a bad bone in his body.”

Meg DeFrancesco did community theater as a youngster, performing in plays at The Grand in Ellsworth, and then followed in her sister Meredith’s footsteps in another direction – up the Blue Hill peninsula to WERU-FM, where Meredith has been a longtime volunteer.

After graduating from high school, DeFrancesco went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., in part because the school had lots of options for a girl with her heart set on performing. There she joined an improvisation troupe and started to gravitate more seriously toward comedy.

It was good training for her stint on “The Colbert Report.”

“Everyone has the same sarcastic, really smart sense of humor,” she said. “Everyone from the accountant to the coordination to the production assistants – and the writers, of course.”

And she enjoys working with Colbert.

“He’s just such a great person – he’s always very outgoing and makes sure to say hello to everyone when he comes in,” she said. “He’s not your typical star.”

But although DeFrancesco has New York-sized aspirations, she hasn’t forgotten her Maine roots – and loves to come back to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

“It’s so fun to see the contrast between Maine and New York,” she said. “You start out with the bright lights and the city streets, and I end up on a dirt driveway in darkness.”