Colbert

I thought I could get away with just enjoying Stephen Colbert’s brilliant performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. But I feel strangely compelled to say something, something more than the stray remarks I’ve dropped in my family forum and in comment boxes at various sites.

That the president didn’t find Colbert’s ironic “celebration” of him funny is hardly surprising. Some who were amused seemed to find it strange that the audience of reporters and muckamucks was not—that they were, in fact, visibly discomfitted, or hid their smirks behind their hands as they leaned on their elbows and watched the vivisection of George W. Bush, eyes darting from the torturer to the tortured up on the dais, mouths curled in disdain when the barbs would periodically change direction and land in their midst.

After initially reporting only on the president’s antics with his competent but predictable doppelgänger and largely ignoring Colbert, the corporate media bestirred itself a few days later to acknowledge the fact that Colbert, who supposedly bombed at the Washington Hilton on Saturday, was all the rage online on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday … (Copies of the C-SPAN’s broadcast sprouted all over the internet like mushrooms after a storm.) “Yeah, but he wasn’t that funny,” the big names of the big media sniffed.

In a sense, they were right. Colbert had bombed—them. The president and the press. And if you were one of them, it didn’t feel very funny. If you weren’t, and if you thought they have both been criminally negligent if not malfeasant for the last five years (or even more, in the case of the press), it wasn’t just funny, it was exquisite.

Supposedly Colbert broke the rules. Supposedly the annual Correspondents’ Dinner is a time for the press and the president to lay aside their differences and enjoy some good-natured ribbing. In ancient times warring Greeks would lay down their arms every four years and celebrate their common humanity in sporting competition. When Calvin Coolidge attended the first Correspondents’ Dinner, no doubt the feeling was similar, but without the naked athletes. It has since become a sort of high-toned amateur hour, with skits and standup performed by those who should keep their day jobs, and generally do.

So now, in the Year of Our Lord 2006, here cometh to the banquet the jester Stephen Colbert, and he gives them a spot-on caricature of a right-wing, fact-challenged TV blowhard. That’s what he does five days a week on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. It should have been acceptable. Why wasn’t it? It soon became clear it was not “all in fun.” There was just too much nasty reality in it—truthy bits everyone is afraid to say to Bush’s face, the kinds of things a court fool would tell the king to keep the guy grounded.

But the main thing is, it showed that the White House correspondents had already broken the rules: they had not spent the previous 364 days being a pain in the president’s ass. They had been his willing accomplices for five years running. They had been derelict in their duties. So Colbert was being perfectly traditional in flipping the president–press corps relationship; it’s just that the relationship had already been flipped. The president would get one day of rough treatment after hundreds of days of kiss-kiss. Then they could go back to their high-status, high-paying stenography, the president could go back into his bubble, and Colbert would go back to his “proper” audience—folks who appreciate irony, think facts are worth paying attention to, and suspect the motives of those in power.

After rubbing the tender spots where they collectively got gored, the mainstream press may eventually smack its collective forehead and cry out, “Hey, that damned ox was right!” Then again, if the bloggers think Colbert was great, he must be a real stinker with a real stinking agenda. “God, I hate bloggers!”