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…

Ah, but difficile est saturam non scribere.

As for Colbert, it’s taken him a little while to discover the character, rather like an actor during a run, but I think it’s perhaps a little more suited to Juvenalian times than Stewart’s schlemiel straight man. (And the Bush vs. Bush thing was picked out of the Horatian mode: insider yukyuks.)

You missed what Schieber wrote when Bush pretended to look under his desk for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at this same event a couple of years ago:

“My, what brilliant comedy! A powerful man acknoweldges his fallibility—what a light comedic touch! For a moment the peons feel enabled to laugh at the king—Bush is a true maestro of comedy! Of course I could think about what is going right now and get disgusted with both the President and the sycophantic press, but why would I want to let politics interfere with the artistic judgment of a New Republic editor? And anyway, that would be fucking Stalinist.”

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.

“My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left—until recently more common on the right—wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value.”

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 supposee McClellan doesn’t have children of his own?

I liked seeing these jokes made in front of the people they were about. Seeing the generals deal was particularly good. I’m sure most of them miss the sharper barbs aimed at them on TV.

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, because his subject matter was his audience. The guy was standing ten feet from Bush, and spoke to him directly; he was addressing a room full of reporters.

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.

Wax Banks is probably correct about both the lack of accompanying laughter and the irrelevance of that lack given Colbert’s presumed point in the context. Colbert is important because he is one of the very few contemporary sources of (popular culture) satire that draws blood. (The Daily Show can do this as well, but Colbert has dropped the “frat boy” humor elements to go for an aggressive parody. Had the correspondents laughed out loud, it would have been largely at their own failures.

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.