The Colbert Report is my favorite show on television. Moving well beyond the Daily Show, there is a wonderful depth, richness and variety to Colbert's humor that moves past holier than thou snark and not truly critical pastiche to instead embrace biting cultural satire that does indeed have an ulterior motive. The Colbert Report is a direct attack on contemporary conservatism, self-obsession, plutocracy, media culture, and even our national iconography. His speech at the White House correspondents dinner will go down as an all-time classic in political satire of speaking truth to power:
You can watch parts two and three here. I think the best thing about the speech is that he was invited to give it by people who clearly didn't understand his act. This is understandable, really. As a culture, we have been so inundated with pastiche over the last twenty years that it is hard to recognize actual satire when it comes along. Frank Rich was correct when he wrote:
Writing six months later, New York Times columnist Frank Rich called Colbert's after-dinner speech a "cultural primary" and christened it the "defining moment" of the United States' 2006 midterm election
I agree that this was a defining cultural moment. Colbert's satire at the dinner went beyond mere respectful joking about the institutional power structure in America, and also beyond "a pox on both your houses" snark that posits both the person dishing out the snark and the audience receiving it as superior to the subject being mocked. The former is what we often see on late night talk shows, and the latter is what we see on the Daily Show. Colbert, instead, actively uses his humor to expose a corrupt and dangerous set of institutional power structures in America, and does so from a decidedly partisan ideological perspective. It isn't meant to please everyone--not even close. Whether or not someone thinks his humor "crossed the line" is demonstrative of how one feels about our existing institutional power structures.
So, now Stephan Colbert is trying to get on the ballot for both the Republican and Democratic primaries in South Carolina, and he seems quite serious about it. In fact, he will appear on Meet the Press this weekend to discuss it, which should be brilliant if it is anything like his speech at the correspondents' dinner. Given all of this, I have to admit that if I lived in South Carolina, I would be tempted to vote for Colbert in the primary. While, in the end, it is still just comedy and satire, I am always looking for candidates who come from a similar cultural perspective on the utterly broken state of some of our most powerful institutions in America. Colbert "gets" that to a degree few other candidates in the past ten years have ever gotten that. While that isn't enough to make someone a good President, it is a start.
So, I hope that Colbert makes it onto the ballot. I doubt he will receive more than 1% of the vote, but it should be fun to watch anyway. It looks like an amusing form of protest that incorporates the primary process. And it also should be fun to watch him mock Tim Russert to his face on Sunday morning.
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