Adding Colbert to the Fire

White House correspondents correspond - they also dine and do so at dinners.

Stephen Colbert is something I've decided to call a "value" comedian. That is, his main appeal is that he is a proponent of a view point and has found some novel way to express that viewpoint. His gift is not in adding anything new to any kind of debate, but in his ability to fold two aspects of something together in order to delineate an ironic kill zone. We like him because he says stuff we like to hear (or, as the case may be, says stuff we don't like to hear in a way we like to hear it). In today's NY Times story about Colbert's "address" (perhaps a bit of a misnomer) to the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, reporter Jacques Steinberg calls John Stewart Colbert's "comedy patron," which also seems to me a strange misuse - Colbert is a beneficiary of Stewart's benevolent largesse, yeah, but moreso he comes off as Stewart's protege. Colbert's blustery, ironized rhetoric is the inverse of Stewart's fake unprofessionalism. Stewart is endearing while Colbert is kind of grotesque. One of Stewart's hugely powerful techniques is constantly reassuring the audience and his guests that he is no way a professional, that he is totally inept. In fact, if Stewart actually was any of those things, he would look a lot like Colbert's character. Stewart's repudiations of professionalism are in fact the marks of his professionalism, which makes him interesting. Colbert on the other hand, while probably wittier, more incisively satirical than Stewart, constantly looks constrained by his character, and breaks out at times to remind us, "Hey, it's me, Stephen! I'm not really a conservative blowhard!"

Which is why I can kind of sympathize with all of the non-laughers at the WHCA Dinner. Read over the transcript and see how many lines Colbert either adapts or repeats verbatim from The Colbert Report. The concept of "truthiness" - the idea that truth is based on gut feelings rather than facts - has gone from an awesome bit on the show to the entire axis on which the The Colbert Report spins. Granted, it was a really good idea, but Colbert's constant references to it come off kind of clunky. It's the secret decoder ring to his entire show, but as an idee fixe, it doesn't seem quite rich enough to sustain the program for much longer. Those at the dinner who might have been prone to laugh already have laughed, and those who were not prone to laugh didn't. Which isn't to say it wasn't funny, it's just funny in the way Colbert is funny all of the time - and also nobody likes being lambasted right to their face.

I'm sure part of the silence had to come from the fact that this was a fake journalist delivering a pretty scathing endictment to a bunch of real journalists. And that there was none of the good-natured poking-fun-at-self that tends to defuse satire-gone-tense. This, of course, is where Stewart shines brightest - even though Stewart is pretty transparently liberal, he's not partisan, and he's certainly never above directing his jabs at himself. In his address, Colbert's targets were a) Republicans and/or B) Journalists. Lord help you if you're both, and Colbert's implicit claim is that, if you're a journalist, you are. This what makes the speech so brazen: Colbert condemns a handful of communities of which he is not a part, and then engages in no self-criticism at all, or even criticism of Democrats. Hence the bad reception: comedy only goes over when the comedian can align himself with his audience, and that certainly didn't happen. Stewart's Crossfire salvo was intended as a an act of self-policing - trying to get the (shudder) Newstainment people (of which he is one) at least to acknowledge their role in the discursive mess that is public political discussion. Colbert, neither journalist nor Republican, expected people to laugh with him at themselves, while he laughed at, not with (to be fair, his bit about Scalia went over like gangbusters with the man himself).

So maybe it's brave to make fun of the president while he's twenty feet away from you - the gesture is appreciated, for sure - it may be a bit much to expect him to laugh, too.