Oh, this project has been a long time coming, but I finally put together a button that plays Stephen Colbert samples, as seen in The Colbert Report's segment "Bears & Balls". The hardware consists of two pieces found at Adafruit: a large red arcade button (originally a modified Staples "That was easy" button on the show, but this button is nicer); and the Adafruit Audio FX sound board, a fantastic little piece of hardware that allows you to effortlessly trigger audio samples (and can include an optional amplifier interface on the board, so you can have a complete player/amp combo in one piece). It's made for standalone usage; no Arduino or other computer hardware needed. And it's small enough that it can fit in just about any enclosure. So it's perfect for simple projects like this, or even more complex projects where you might have several inputs triggering different samples.
It works very well, and the soldering was simple enough that even a novice like me can put the wiring together. Now my only problem is, where do I keep this piece of equipment? Probably some place where I occasionally need to hear Stephen Colbert saying "BEES!"