Was Colbert Funny?


If you haven't seen the video of Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner you can find it on various links; I watched it on Salon.com, at Video Dog Was Colbert funny? It reminds me of when Lenny Bruce asked how you know whether something is pornography.

He observed that one man's art is another man's pornography. It's a class thing. "If a guy can rip off a piece of ass with class, that's art. If you show factory workers, who have no expertise with stag shows, that's pornography." Colbert ripped off a piece of ass with class. Whether or not it was funny is a retrospective by witnesses to an accident with injuries.

Colbert is probably the first person to say to the President's face what a lot of people would say if they could get close enough. When Colbert said that the polls reflect what people are thinking about "in reality," and used his hands to put "in reality" in quotes, he transferred more than a joke, and it goes beyond whether or not somebody thinks he was funny. He was funny if you like to watch the jester kick the king in the ass.

As strange as it might seem right now, when we first got involved with the Bush spin machine there was an actual debate over whether or not America wanted to be "faith based" or "reality based." The Media treated it like a debate between choosing a parliamentary system of proportional representation or a unitary executive chosen by the Supreme Court.

Here is how Colbert dealt with that part of the neurosis:

My name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it's my privilege to celebrate this president. We're not so different, he and I. We get it. We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book.

Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the "No Fact Zone." Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.

I'm a simple man with a simple mind. I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states. And I cannot wait to see how the Washington Post spins that one tomorrow. I believe in democracy. I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit.

Colbert expoused his faith in laissez faire capitalism when he said, "I believe that the government which governs least, governs best."

He paused.

"And by that standard we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

Was that funny? Well, humor is created at the intersection of two lines of logic, and they certainly intersected there. Wit is a parallel line of logic that is running alongside the exposed one until a well timed moment of intersection. So, maybe the wit was the guy who booked Colbert for the Correspondent's Dinner.

But, maybe the President's men, and women are real conservatives, and value old humor, say, before Ross at the New Yorker introduced abstract humor into the mainstream, and what was funny was exaggeration, like Babe and the Blue Ox, or Saddam and his WMDs. Maybe they are much funnier than we realize because we have forgotten that humor used to depend on tall tales. This administration must like tall tales because they pay people to print them, both here and in Iraq.

Or maybe the real problem with half the room was that the President was sitting there, and Colbert wasn't being obsequious. It's hard to laugh when you're worried about somebody. Doesn't he know Accidents can happen? His cajones were as big as advertised. Here is Colbert in a direct exchange with Mr. Bush:

By the way, Mr. President, thank you for agreeing to be on my show. I was just as shocked as everyone here is, I promise you. How's Tuesday for you? I've got Frank Rich, but we can bump him. And I mean bump him. I know a guy. Say the word.

The country for years and years has had a right wing with policies were shaped in response to the Cold War. The discrediting and weakening of their social control agenda after Vietnam led to peace and an exuberant flowering of personal freedom. It's easier to destroy than to build, so they began to campaign on a hatred of the government itself, because it collects taxes, and finally they got their Cold War back, just substituting "terrorists" for "communists."

They are all about appearances. Colbert pointed this out quickly and elegantly when he said:

I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Is this funny? It was funny if you had watched the news as staged photo ops and wished the media would stop just taking public relations handouts and treating it like news, and wished somebody knew how to expose it on prime time. As it turned out it was on CSPAN and wasn't broadcast on the networks at all, but with the Internet, we apparently have learned to make our own prime time.

For the Bush voters, waking up to the destruction of the democracy might be more like returning from under the sea than parachuting in from heaven. You get the bends if you do it too quickly. Some of the people in the audience listening to Colbert were stunned, and looked around nervously as if to see if Colonel Miller was watching them.

If you like the trance, Colbert is a disturbance. If you want to get back to reality, you have to at least appreciate the elegance with which the comedian chided Bush for his willingness to treat facts, science and history as malleable toys to shape his "faith based" realities.

And I just like the guy. He's a good joe. Obviously loves his wife, calls her his better half. And polls show America agrees. She's a true lady and a wonderful woman. But I just have one beef, ma'am.

I'm sorry, but this reading initiative. I'm sorry, I've never been a fan of books. I don't trust them. They're all fact, no heart. I mean, they're elitist, telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American! I'm with the president, let history decide what did or did not happen.

If Colbert wasn't as funny to the President's collaborators as he was to the rest of us, he certainly was skillful. He operated like a surgeon, exposing each of the lies the media has fostered and passed along.

The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will. As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story:  the president's side, and the vice president's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason:  they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

An argument about whether Colbert was funny is about as valid as arguing about whether he's Catholic. The man is professional and he did what he came to do and it was real news. The mainstream media didn't recognize it, perhaps because it was the problem of the fish trying to see the water.

Colbert did to the White House Correspondents what John Stewart did to the CNN Crossfire talking heads. After he demonstrated that he can intellectually manhandle them, he told them, "We could use some help." Stewart has consistently been saying the media is a big part of the problem, because they have become collaborators in the government's abuse of the truth.

There is a small but growing revolution against the commercialization of news. CNN, Fox, and the network news is becoming the real joke, and more and more people are starting to get it.

I wonder if they will think it's funny when it finally soaks in on them that they are less believable than the comedy show journalists?

Or will they just find it ironic?

Posted: Thu - May 4, 2006 at 04:49 PM