Speaking Truthiness to Power

The whole thing better quality in three parts on YouTube.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Colbert is overrated, he should’ve stayed with Stewart.

Are you serious? Colbert’s show outshines Stewarts fairly regularly.

You think? I guess the shows I downloaded weren’t the best ones.

“Hindrocket” supplies the unintentional comedy

The big news story was that the featured comedian, someone named Steve Colbert, apparently bombed. He did a virulently anti-Bush routine that got few laughs. Hot Air has good footage of both routines; you can judge for yourself who was funnier.

I wasn’t surprised by this, inasmuch as I’d never heard of Steve Colbert, and it’s been a long time since a heard a political humorist who was very funny. Comedians, in general, don’t seem very funny to me nowadays.

I was nervous for him as I watched — I felt like he was going to be detained.

The mainstream media is full of bad people, it seems to me. Bad people don’t have a sense of humor, especially about themselves.

But if you read the press or watch cable the story of the night was Bush’s humility in taking part in his own skit prior to Colbert’s, lampooning himself viciously to the tune of “sometimes I don’t speak proper. huh huh.”

Colbert just gets a name check.

I actually thought Scalia was genuinely laughing, and I can see him enjoying Colbert’s reference to the recent kerfuffle.

The crowd reaction shots seemed to show people covering their mouths, as if trying to conceal and restrain their mirth.

Overall, I get the impression that the Washington press corps’ reaction is “why yes, we gossip about all this stuff all the time, and we know it’s all true, but it’s just gauche to bring it up in public” nevermind that the issues at hand are not romantic peccadillos or hygeine problems but fraudulently-launched war, grabs for dictatorial executive power, and general incompetence.

I thought Colbert wasn’t quite as funny as on his show, but there were a few lines that were much funnier to me than they apparently were to the people sitting there.

I agree that it seemed Scalia was actually laughing, rather than just being polite.

It’s also a thankless task, because the Washington press corps is a little too self-important to let themselves be roasted. Plus, there’s no good way to make fun of the President for having 32% approval while he’s sitting there. Which lends the whole proceeding a slightly uncomfortable tone.

Colbert was very good, it must have been one of the toughest writing jobs ever – speaking truth to the power sitting right next to him, while being sufficiently funny not to be taken down by the secret service. Still, I think he was so concerned with truth that it took some of the fun out of his performance. Of course, it’s still a sight to see.

But what the Bush/Bush performance showed once again after the numerous recent hints (I particularly liked his off-the-cuff stand-up show at the SAIS school!) is the guy’s comedic talent. GWB clearly missed his calling. Really, the White House script forces him to play a role (and learn the lines for it) that he just can’t play. And he knows it.

Once he’s out of office, wouldn’t it be great to have a Comedy Central Crossfire Edition Stewart vs Bush? If the offer is good enough, maybe he’d even resign for it?

The reaction from the Right has been remarkable: among high-profile Rightie pundits, the consensus seems to be that Colbert bombed. Now there’s probably an argument to be made about people of a particular political disposition being unable to appreciate irony, but beyond that, the man was actually pretty goddamn funny a number of times. The line about glaciers played well as the crowd realized they weren’t going to get a Jesse Jackson joke and were caught off-guard; the John McCain crack (about speaking at Bob Jones U.) was vicious but I’d be surprised if Bush et al. even realized why. Then there’s this:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

…which I know is straight off his show but is still both gutsy and funny. And never mind that the line about writing novels of plucky Washington reporters standing up to the Administration – ‘You know, fiction!’ – was over-the-top and obvious; the real audience wasn’t just the nodding yes-men tools present at the talk, but the many many many people who’ve now seen the routine and are talking about it.

I think people are underrating the monologue in large part because there’s no laughter to accompany it – like seeing a film without music or sitcom without laugh track. In front of a different audience I think that routine would have killed, though delivering it to that audience was its point. I laughed aloud several times watching Colbert speak; I’m not sure what people think should have happened.

Uh, clearly we do, abb1, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about it.

Wax banks

hit part of the problem: The audience was brutally skewered and had a hard time laughing–except for Thomas. The pauses between jabs were met with icy silence.

It is hard to do parody when the facts are the parody.

We are fast closing in on a world that simply is absurd.

The audience was brutally skewered and had a hard time laughing—except for Thomas.

Actually, at least three people were shown in reaction shots having a grand old time: Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame (no surprise, I suppose)…and Antonin Scalia, who was guffawing at a joke at his own expense. I suppose we ought to give the guy credit for, at least once, being willing to laugh at himself.

Surely the subversive element of the performance is undermined to the degree that its targets are NOT discomfited by it and can thus laugh at it, no?

The limited laughter of those inside makes it better for us on the outside. I’d have liked it if he’d finished it off by saying ‘fuck you’ to the president in order to make clear it wasn’t really a joke.

Also awesome: Colbert cracking up while he was benig introduced, slapping the table while hearing about that lame-ass “career-threatening” moment for the guy at the AP.

Colbert’s routine at the Dinner was somewhat inferior to his show. I’m not quite able to articulate why.

One simple reason is that on the show, guests have to converse with him. Colbert’s more-knee-jerk-than-thou schtick seems to make that very difficult for most people (self-described liberals and conservatives alike). Kristol recently put his foot firmly in his mouth. The funniest, however, was the conservative senator (from Georgia?) who volubly assented to Colbert’s insistence that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, but then could only stutter when confronted with the suggestion that, in the interest of “de-gayifying our highways” (or something like that), they should also be prohibited from getting driver’s licenses.

I love Colbert’s show–along with The Office and Southpartk, I think it’s currently the funniest show on TV (and he and his writers have to make four episodes a week, unlike 22 (The Office) or 16 (Southpark) a year)–, but I didn’t care so much for his performance. I think the problem was that he was too blunt; this is not to say that he wasn’t correct. Only that when someone makes jokes that are more like one-liners from a campaign speech than satire, it comes off as shrill and self-righteous rather than as clever and, well, funny.

My favorite part of his show doesn’t have to do with his interviews with his guests (who often don’t quite know how to react) or “The Word” (which is, I think, the weakest part of the show because the political jokes aren’t subtle in comparison with the jokes on the rest of the show) but rather Colbert’s complete inhabitation of his character and his natural reactions to things. I really suspend disbelief when I hear him, on his show, defend insane propositions (like “truth can be found in the gut”); that is, I really believe that his character believes what he says, which is what makes it so funny.

The problem with unsubtle jokes coming from Colbert (e.g., “she’s trying to figure out why we invaded Iraq!”) is that I lose my ability to believe that his character really believes what he’s saying; the Colbert-qua-blowhard disappears and gets replaced by Stephen Colbert, the actual person, pretending to say things he knows isn’t true. And that doesn’t strike me as very funny.

I don’t think Colbert’s performance was close to the funniest thing I’ve ever seen; it’s not even close to the funniest thing I’ve ever seen him do. But it was pretty funny, and putting things into context it’s really quite priceless.

…evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left…

Heh-heh. Now, this is funny. I understand what the fella is trying to say here, but he is expressing it in the exactly Colbertish grotesque manner.

It’s no more ‘Stalinist’ than, say, designing a very affordable very popular automobile is Hitleresque…