Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [92]
The Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush (W’s daddy) crushed Mondale and Ferraro. Only the communist republic of Minnesota (home of Mondale and Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s necessarily wide stance) and the socialist utopia of the District of Columbia (home of the saucy, non-plain-vanilla-man-loving Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton) went for the Defeatocrats. Nation, thank you for pre-supporting our president in a time of pre-war. However, if you voted or would have voted for those who favored pre-appeasing the evildoers, I accept your apology.
Now if initially you were tempted to answer “Hillary Clinton” in response to the impromptu quiz above and you suppressed that idea because she isn’t a racist, then shame on you for letting facts and common decency intimidate (and assassinate) you. It appears that you don’t have Stephen Colbert’s balls (tucked away in Jane Fonda’s lockbox).
Colbert’s Id-ish Improv and Irony
The fact that Colbert gets away with so much on The Colbert Report—ironic jabs and controversial riffs and associations that might shipwreck lesser talents—is no mean feat. Consider the double-barreled challenge he faces, as a sharp-edged ironist and improvisational humorist, from the Moralityites (ancient foes of the Sodomites).
Going all the way back to Socrates’s Athens, there have been “moral majorities” out to condemn and silence smarty pants like Colbert. Socrates, unlike some of his fans in the Middle Ages, didn’t lose his tongue for his ironic and philosophical send up of the moral and religious beliefs of his fellow citizens. Instead, at the ripe old age of seventy, when his prostate undoubtedly was good to grow, the Athenians generously gave him all the hemlock he would need for the rest of his (gurgling, convulsing) life.
But those were the good old days, right? Not quite. Even in our own culture, where we used to pride ourselves on having the freedoms of speech and conscience, moral censuring of irony isn’t relegated to rednecks like little Jerry Falwell (the proudest cock of his upright flock—before he went to be with the great Rooster in the sky). For example, Alasdair MacIntyre, an admirer of Socrates and a world-renowned ethicist, argues in his book, Dependent Rational Animals, that irony has long worn out its welcome. According to MacIntyre, irony is a corrosive and destructive force in our culture. From this perspective, Stephen’s stardom is a surface-level lesion indicative of a pervasive cultural sickness.
That’s one moralistic angle from which Colbert’s biting brand of humor is criticized. Another pertains to the very conditions for the possibility of Colbert’s brilliant spontaneity. According to Jedi masters of improvisation, Keith Johnstone and Del Close (Colbert’s own mentor) the basic principle of improvisational humor is to accept everything that happens or is said to one in the moment of a spontaneous performance (good rule for other all too brief performances as well). Think of Colbert’s off-the-cuff responses in interviews, his reactions to his own gaffes, or the jam sessions of writing that yield “The WØRD.” In such moments, to seize on openings for creativity and humor, moral qualms that might block or hinder them have to be relaxed. To invoke Freud again: superego, the uptight, hyper-moralized voice of the internalized parent and other authority figures, has to be shunned in favor of id, the devilish, unsocialized, aggressive adolescent constantly perched on one’s shoulder (who always giggles at “caucus”).
So those of us Colbert manages to entertain, provoke and even inspire with his distinctive fusion of quick-witted