Col. Quisp wrote:Haven't read this thread al the way through so apologies if someone already commented on this...
I just saw a clip of last night's Colbert Report on "hardball." It showed our President joking along and ordering the general to shave colbert's head. For some reason, this offended me deeply. Making a joke out of war...sickening.
First of all, my apologies to Mac for being such an intolerable snot-nosed cranky bitch in my prior post. Which I'd like to extend to the rest of the thread, in a more general way. Please forgive me. I don't know why I suddenly had a character-changing snit, but I very much regret that I did.
Second of all....The thing about Stephen Colbert is that he's not really a satirist. Or a comic, in the way that Jon Stewart -- who comes out of traditional "I'll-be-here-all-week" touring stand-up world -- is a comic. He's a (sorry) performance artist working in longform improvisational theater in keeping with the principles of Del Close, with whom he trained.
Although he wasn't solely making a joke out of the war, I agree with Col. Quisp that making a joke out of the war -- or, more precisely, making highly offensive, very superficial jokes about the expendable people who fight them from the POV of someone who's selectively blind to every aspect of those people's humanity and, indeed, existence, except insofar as it validates his own view of himself as honorable, brave, and morally infallible -- was indeed one of the things he was doing. And it was indeed sickening. As well as discomfiting.
And all the more so because he wasn't breaking character sightly to be charming or likable or quick-witted (as he is, but his character isn't). Which he doesn't do very often under any circumstance, actually. But both the written and physical structure of the show kind of automatically do it for him when he's broadcasting from home base. Given that the fundamental ground-rules for the long-form improv call for almost everything he does on the set or on-camera -- whether it was received well or poorly and, for that matter, whether it was intentional or a fuck-up -- is instantly incorporated into the legend of the character's towering greatness, which is the only legend he appears consciously ever to have heard.
Anyway. We're all heavily conditioned to expect the third act of every half-hour of television entertainment to end with a tidy and redemptive resolution to whatever tensions have been raised and explored in the first and second acts, and equally heavily conditioned to expect each part of a comedic set-up to build toward a punch-line, where it comes to a stop. (As comedic set-ups on
The Colbert Report usually do, in fact.) He's a very skilled performer, as well as an exceptionally good actor in the larger context of the medium. And he was going out of his way to come across as genuinely fatuous and hokey in a referentially specific, puerile, and hoary (plus, I guess, whore-y) USO performing tradition for which Bob Hope is the iconic standard-bearer. Which he was also subverting throughout. However, he was doing that pretty much exclusively with flatly delivered jokes that he was neither telling nor peforming as if they were funny. Whereas he was playing the golf-club carrying, well-moisturized-and-exfoliated, self-involved and unthinkingly kow-towing part of the schtick so excessively broadly and peppily that it was not only not funny, but actively off-putting.
I seriously doubt anyone's going to agree with me on this, but all of that was and is one-hundred percent consonant with long-form comedic improvisation according to the principles taught by Del Close. I'm not saying anything as demented as "He was aiming to be not-very-funny." Because he's a professional, and also a professional entertainer. But it wasn't very funny. And what I would maintain is: That wasn't simply because the act was offensive. It was because of to whom it was offensive. Because although he kept it compatible with the jingoistic character he plays for a living, fundamentally the attitude he was representing wasn't just
any shallow, self-serving, Western-culture-centric and docilely selective comprehension of a war fought by others and overwhelmingly only ever considered by those who aren't parties to it within the context of what's important to them rather than what's important to the people and the unfamiliar-to-most-of-us culture that it's snuffing out and otherwise devastating.
Rather, it was a distorted reflection of the selectively comprehending, prior-agenda-favoring, Western-culture-centric, and whinily complicit but nevertheless comfortably-spoils-of-war-enjoying attitude that we may not all preach but that with very, very few exceptions we sure as hell do practice. Without acknowledging it. With inexcusable moral passivity, not to say complicity. As if it were the most natural and blameless thing in the whole wide world for us just to go about our business with every bit as much faith that we're totally right as character-Stephen-Colbert was doing. And of course that's not a very funny joke when it's a joke that's on you.
That's how I received it, anyway. Which wasn't a whole lot of fun, although I'm not complaining. It's not a very flattering depiction, certainly. But it's not like it's umerited, imo.
Incidentally, I am almost certain that I read somewhere recently that the hardcore,
O'Reilly-Factor-right part of Colbert's natural demo are equally as devoted to the show as their more liberal and/or radical peers are. Which is very devoted. The only difference is that they don't realize he doesn't mean or is making fun of stuff that's not really very noticeably outlandish in the context they inhabit.
Although in my experience, as in OP ED's, he serves more as a proximate occasion for radical-ish politicization on the part of the formerly apolitical than he does anything else. But the context that I inhabit probably naturally trends that way to begin with, even when I'm not in it, doing what I can to nudge it in that direction. I have no idea how representative of the larger culture that is or isn't, and to be honest, it's not very meaningful to me either way. I appreciate what he does on its own terms, and therefore neither want nor need for him to be the political savior of the Western world, too. I mean, I can't really fault him for not being something no single individual can be, ever has been, or ever will be. He uses the resources at his disposal to empower We the People of whom he is one, to the best of his ability and judgment, which is as much as anyone can do. Not to mention more than most, present company excepted.