Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [81]
In the 2008 election coverage, for example, we’ve spent most of our time talking about Barack Obama’s missing flag pin and the beliefs of his pastor, John McCain’s age and the names he calls his wife, and Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits and whether she cried in New Hampshire. Forget about climate change, war, energy, health care, and a steadily weakening dollar. Those issues don’t sell magazines or garner strong ratings.
Consider Colbert’s famous speech at the White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner. He went after the president on illegal wiretapping, the Iraq war, his low approval ratings, his exploitative photo ops and political posturing, his stubbornness, his denial of global warming, his reliance on a timid and complicit media, the leaked identity of Valerie Plame—and the next day none of the major opinion makers said a word about it, or if they did it was to critique Colbert for failing to be funny. The mainstream media ignored the content of his speech with a nation-wide collective yawn, even though some of his jokes were downright blistering in their condemnation of the president.
I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound—with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world. (White House Correspondents’ Dinner)
This is extraordinary. Colbert told the President to his face on national television that he was a failure in the Iraq War, the defining issue of his presidency. “I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.” Then he blamed the president’s own bullheadedness for his failures. “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady … He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man’s beliefs never will.” Biting stuff, the type of attacks one would expect to be newsworthy, maybe even paradigm-shifting in the national media, but nobody other than the marginalized blogosphere blinked an eye.
Charlie Rose discussed Colbert’s “failures” in his December 8th, 2006 interview. Comedy can be insightful, persuasive, even visionary, he said. Often it’s more revealing than journalism because it operates under fewer constraints. But in the end it’s a toothless tiger. It never manages to effect the change it envisions. “Cabaret satire had never been better than it was pre-Weimar,” Rose said. “And it just stopped Hitler in his tracks!” Colbert didn’t miss a beat. He admitted that his jokes were politically impotent. “I would say that in the lead up to the Iraq war, The Daily Show was highly dubious of the idea. And it didn’t seem to stop it.” But he also suggested that he never expects anything more. “You can’t be disappointed if you don’t actually change things because it can’t have been your intention.” In comedy you go for the laugh, he said, not for social justice.
This may sound like Colbert is denying that he has a political agenda, much as Jon Stewart has done.139 But it’s more than that. There is a paradox here. Colbert (i) intends to illustrate hypocrisy as a character, but (ii) he doesn’t expect to change things. This says something about us, Colbert’s audience. He intends to tell or show us the truth, but he doesn’t expect us to do