Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [131]
I just suffered a recent wrist injury and I couldn’t do anything. I was so careless about my wrist I just broke it because I didn’t take any precautions. But now, with the wrist strong bracelet (when I get one) I can always remember to keep that wrist strong. And if I forget how to spell wrist, strong, or wriststrong … BOOM, it’s right there.211
In what is perhaps his most redundant gesture, in a December 2007 episode, Colbert gave his audience a present by giving himself a present. In a later episode, he called on The Colbert Nation to sacrifice the concept of sacrifice. The more passively receptive the viewer is to Colbert’s message, the more patriotically freem “the heroes” are presumed to be. That supposed receptivity to the Colbert message is performed repeatedly when Colbert works up the audience to cheer his most outrageous statements or to boo guests who don’t submit to a Colbert “nailing.”
Always at the center of his own universe, the persona Colbert absorbs the media discourse of the moment and marshals it for real action on the part of his fans in ways of which other media personalities can only dream. He takes literally the self-important claims of figures like Bill O’Reilly—who actually claimed that his viewers’ boycott of France caused palpable damage to that country’s economy, and later threatened a boycott of Canada—and calls on his audience to do likewise.
The fact that a Colbert Nation action isn’t really important or meaningful or transformative isn’t the point. The point is that fans will do anything Colbert tells them to do, often in extremely creative ways, as we’ve seen in the Green Screen Challenges to stage Stephen fighting with a light saber, or to pose Presidential candidate John McCain in more interesting settings. Freem allows Colbert to do this by blurring the distinction between doing something and doing nothing. In the end, the projected audience of the show—the real people who construct themselves as part of the faux Colbert Nation, the real fake “heroes”—ironically imbibe Colbert’s brand of heroicized freem ideology.
Who Watches the Watchers?
One question still remains: when fans of the show post on the Colbert Nation website extolling the importance of the WristStrong bracelet, when the studio audience ironically cheers Stephen Colbert’s outrageous political positions, when they change Wikipedia entries at his behest, are they resisting the narcotic of a freem media or swallowing it wholesale? At what point does the parodic audience of a parodic television show cross the line and become simply another set of consumers of Viacom’s “product”? And the line has recently gotten even fuzzier. When Colbert insulted Canton, Georgia, on July 21st, 2008 by referring to it as “that crappy Canton” instead of the good Canton in Ohio, the responses of local officials were covered in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . When Colbert “apologized” by calling another Canton in Kansas an even worse series of names on July 30th, and in the aftermath of that went after Canton, South Dakota, on August 5th, CNN didn’t wait. Before there was any local reaction or media coverage, on August 6th CNN sent a news crew to ask residents for their reaction to a slight they didn’t know they’d suffered. When Colbert and his nation end up as news stories for a world-renowned news organization, that’s not just a slow news day, that’s the emperor’s new clothes becoming the latest fashion trend.
Those of us who watch Colbert might well worry that we have fallen for the siren song of freem as well. It’s incredibly fun to laugh with and at Colbert’s persona and the positions he takes—after all, he’s a satirical genius. But there’s a sense in which he