It has been several days now since his high-profile comedy gig at the White House Correspondent dinner but the hills are alive with the sound of talk about Stephen Colbert’s performance.
Did he step out of line and by implication is that a no-no in today’s Washington D.C? Must satire to a certain degree now be deferential? Did his satirical target President George Bush just sit there displeased or was Bush actually close to exploding? Should people send Colbert a message (whether they support him or not)?
And the overriding question is: Colbert was hired by somebody. He isn’t an unknown show business/comedy entity. What did they expect? That he’d do his act reading recycled jokes from Milton Berle’s Private Jokefile?
The New York Times enlightens us on that one:
Mark Smith, a reporter for The Associated Press who is president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, acknowledges that he had not seen much of Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central before he booked him as the main entertainment for the association’s annual black-tie dinner on Saturday night. But he says he knew enough about Mr. Colbert — “He not only skewers politicians, he skewers those of us in the media” — to expect that he would cause some good-natured discomfort among the 2,600 guests, many of them politicians and reporters.
What Mr. Smith did not anticipate, he said, was that Mr. Colbert’s nearly 20-minute address would become one of the most hotly debated topics in the politically charged blogosphere. Mr. Colbert delivered his remarks in character as the Bill O’Reillyesque commentator he plays on “The Colbert Report,” although this time his principal foil, President Bush, was just a few feet away.
“There was nothing he said where I would have leapt up to say, ‘Stop,’ ” said Mr. Smith, who introduced Mr. Colbert and sat near him on the dais. “I thought he was very funny,” Mr. Smith added, though there was hardly consensus on that point yesterday.
As we’ve said in a previous post, Colbert’s well-known specialty is irony-heavy humor that came into the show business mainstream most notably with the advent of Saturday Night Live and David Letterman. It assumes shared assumptions on the part of the audience. And while some in the audience shared Colbert’s assumptions it was clear some didn’t and although some others may have as well, their sense of public proprietary (it it seemly for us to laugh at this in public?) could have been in play as well. So many people on the right insisted Colbert bombed; many on the left said he was a genius.
Fans have been vocal, sending thank yous to Colbert (more than 32,000 so far) through this website.
And the non-fans? Some talk to reporters:
Mary Matalin, a Republican who has served the Bush White House as assistant to the president and counselor to the vice president, had a different take.
“This was predictable, Bush-bashing kind of humor,” Ms. Matalin, who was there, said in an interview. Of Mr. Colbert, she said, “Because he is who he is, and everyone likes him, I think this room thought he was going to be more sophisticated and creative.”
Others let their feelings be known to associates — who could then talk to reporters. Note this about one GOPer whose initials are GWB in U.S. News:
Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert’s biting routine at the White House Correspondents Association dinner won a rare silent protest from Bush aides and supporters Saturday when several independently left before he finished.
“Colbert crossed the line,” said one top Bush aide, who rushed out of the hotel as soon as Colbert finished. Another said that the president was visibly angered by the sharp lines that kept coming.
“I’ve been there before, and I can see that he is [angry],” said a former top aide. “He’s got that look that he’s ready to blow.”
Colbert’s routine was similar to what he does on his show, the Colbert Report, but much longer on the topic of Bush, suggesting that the president is out of touch with reality. Aides and reporters, however, said that it did not overshadow Bush’s own funny routine, which featured an impersonator who told the audience what Bush was thinking when he spoke dull speech lines.
Colbert got slammed by a prominent Democrat, The Hill reports:
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) took on a rare role yesterday as a defender of President Bush.
Hoyer came to the defense of the commander in chief after Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where the president took a drubbing from comedian Stephen Colbert.
“I thought some of it was funny, but I think it got a little rough,� Hoyer said. “He is the president of the United States, and he deserves some respect.�
“I’m certainly not a defender of the administration,� Hoyer reassured stunned observers, but Colbert “crossed the line� with many jokes that were “in bad taste.�
Question: does Hoyer ever listen to hugely popular satire group The Capitol Steps? Some of their brilliant song parodies are as pointed (or moreso) than Colbert’s performance. Did politicos and partisans call it too disrespectful when the group they did their hilarious Clinton song “I’m Unzippin My Doo Dah” song during his presidency?
To many in the GOP, Colbert is a symbol of show business types just not getting it. To many Democrats, he’s a profile in courage. The blog Americablog has even urged its readers to contact Hoyer’s office and protest his suggestion that Colbert went too far.
Meanwhile, Colbert won praise from his former boss — also a known practitioner of irony humor:
Probably to no one’s surprise, Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” hailed the performance of his stablemate Stephen Colbert at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents dinner. Colbert’s lampooning of the president and the press has generated a good deal of praise and criticism.
“It was balls-alicious,” Stewart said. “Apparently he was under the impression that they’d hired him to do what he does every night on television” — that is, make fun of conservatives, public officials, and the press in the guise of an O’Reillyesque talk show host.
“We’ve never been prouder of him, but HOLY —-,” Stewart added.
He also described the annual dinner as “where the President and the press corps consummate their loveless marriage.”
On his own show, the report goes on to say, Colbert told viewers that since the room was filled with power players he fit right in:
“Best of all, I got to meet my main man, President Bush,” he said, and even had a chance to shake his hand. “He has very soft hands,” Colbert revealed, “which was surprising. He must wear gloves when he is clearing brush.”
Colbert made fun of his mixed reception at the dinner, re-running the tape of one of his jokes with the audience barely reacting. He described this as “very respectful silence,” and said that actually the crowd loved him.
“They practically carried me out on their shoulders,” he said, “even though I wasn’t ready to go.”
So did Colbert “not get it?” Actually, it still seems a case of part of the audience not “getting it” (the style of comedy) and resentful because in terms of content Bush and the administration “got it.” In other words: the right and the left now have a new poster boy for (you fill in your own catchphrase). And Colbert will probably note an increase in his ratings…as the clip of his appearance gets played over and over on the Internet and becomes part of 21st Century America’s polarized political culture.
MANY WEBLOGS ARE STILL WRITING ABOUT COLBERT. HERE ARE A FEW OF THEM (read trackbacks on this post for more opinions):
The Queen of All Evil, Just One Minute, Ann Althouse, PSoTD,
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.