The Opinionator
The latest divisive national question appears to be, Was Stephen Colbert funny at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night? Two certainties can be ascertained about Colbert’s performance: The liberal blogosphere loved it, and the people in the room didn’t. (If you didn’t catch it on C-SPAN, YouTube has the video of Colbert’s routine in three parts, here, here and here.)
Patrick Gavin’s evaluation at the D.C. media blog Fishbowl DC is representative of the consensus among the attendees. He grades it “a mediocre performance” by Colbert. Based on the reaction in the room, Gavin suggests, “Next candidate for his ‘Who’s Not Honoring Me Now’ segment will probably be the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, confirms Gavin’s judgment. He writes on his personal blog that while he enjoyed Colbert’s routine, “Practically everyone I later surveyed was sour on his performance.”
Watching from the comfort of home, on the other hand, was University of California, Los Angeles, public policy professor Mark Kleiman, who loved Colbert’s appearance. Kleiman calls it an “astonishing rant” that “hit so near the bone … that it drew few laughs, despite its superlative excellence both as text and as performance.”
But what Kleiman found most notable was Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s appreciation of Colbert’s public mockery. Scalia was “laughing hysterically,” Kleiman writes, “not just a polite ha-ha to show that he got the joke and is being a good sport about it, but deep, out-of-control, impossible-to-fake belly-laughs. He is obviously enjoying — really enjoying — a joke at his own expense. No, that doesn’t make up for Bush v. Gore. But it does make Scalia, in this one respect, a better human being than most of us.”
Does that explain the differing reactions? Was the audience in the room uncomfortable with the idea that President Bush didn’t seem to think Colbert was funny? University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse watched from home, and she felt the juxtaposition of comic and target was off-putting:
I love Colbert, but it was a little scary watching him do his “Colbert Report” character outside of his brilliantly comical studio set that frames him as a ridiculous right-wing blowhard. We love the humor in context, but when the targets of the humor are there in the room with him, we can’t dissolve into hilarity. We’re completely distracted by thinking about how the live audience is reacting …
David Frum, a former speechwriter and special assistant to President Bush who calls himself “a huge fan” of “The Colbert Report,” suggests on his National Review blog that, in the presence of an audience of the politicians and reporters who serve as the subjects of his humor, the character of “Stephen Colbert” did not seem as buffoonish as he does on his TV show. The problem, Frum writes, is that Colbert came across as too self-aware:
The dialectic that gives the show his bite is that Colbert and his writers offer a conventional liberal point of view, refracted through the tabloid conservative style of Fox News. The show is most funny when the Colbert character is most unaware that his own words are subverting his supposed right-wing point of view. It is least funny when the show’s liberal substratum rises to the surface, and Colbert loses character and just sounds like … Daily Kos.
Via Donkey o. d.
Bush Colbert Video Stephen Colbert White House Correspondents Dinner Colbert Report Media Blackout
