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between Roosevelt and Bush when he attempted to conflate their perspectives by misstating Roosevelt’s quip as follows: “hit them with the big stick and walk softly away.” When Congressman Sestak respectfully corrected Colbert, his response was “semantics.”165 This spontaneous exchange was funny but also enlightening. Colbert prompted us to notice that there’s a profound difference between having an impressive and intimidating military and using its deadly force. This difference is even more pronounced when military force is flaunted by inviting enemies, as Bush did, to “bring it on”—seemingly welcoming and reveling in the horrible violence of war. Of course, the humbler “big stick” approach is not an option for a hawk like Colbert, who less than a month later, while defending Papa Bear’s profanity-laced tirade on Inside Edition, twice confessed that he has a “tiny, tiny penis.”166

Unlike Bush, however, Colbert has the imagination to extend his testosterone-filled patriotism beyond the borders of the United States to Earth itself. In the first place, he’s not skeptical about or slow to take seriously global warming because “the market has spoken,” that is, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was a commercial success.167 What this means for the id-ish Colbert, however, is that we show our support for our planet, which is in crisis, by talking trash to other planets. So on Earth Day 2008, after leading his audience in an “Earth is #1” chant, Colbert took W’s cowboy diplomacy to the cosmos. He bravely reduced the hot-tempered Mercury to a suck-up sissy: “If you were any further up the sun’s ass, you’d be pure hydrogen.” And that aloof, midget planet, Pluto, got put in its place too: “You’re so small, there’s a bigger gravitational field being generated by my left nut.”168

When Colbert belches forth this seventh-grade bravado, he not only amuses us (which is pleasing and therapeutic itself), he also underscores the childish, bullying tendencies of our policies and the silliness of what now passes for patriotism. In turn, we gain greater recognition of and critical distance from these regrettable features of our culture and our politics. Furthermore, although the folly of our extreme overreaction to 9/11 is painful to acknowledge, Colbert helps us to face up to it through the sleight of hand of his embracing, and even oozing, of it. (Call this an honorable dishonorable discharge, if you will.)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Absurd

Just about everything on The Colbert Report—the atmospherics, the symbols and images, Colbert’s unflagging machismo sacramentally contained in his conservative white male appearance—screams American exceptionalism and blind nationalism. As we have seen, there is a method to this stars-and-stripes madness. So that we might better grasp the ethical thrust of Colbert’s irony, let’s dig even deeper beneath the thick red, white, and blue surface.

Ironists and satirists have long understood that one subtle but effective way to critique an absurd or problematic, but nonetheless widely-held, view is to heap ridiculous, over the top praise and attention on it. The idea behind this strategy of going overboard in fake, fanatical support of a position is that it helps to expose hidden problems and inconsistencies, but in a stealthy, roundabout way. In cases where a belief or view is crucially tied to a person or community’s self-image and sense of importance, this form of critique may be the only practical one available. The incongruities revealed in the process often are humorous and painless to observe. As a result, the criticism goes down easier and has a better chance to get past the mental defenses that we set up to protect our beliefs and buried prejudices.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a Danish philosopher who was very intrigued by irony and was a highly skilled ironist himself, helpfully explains this approach:

It is the most common form of irony to say something earnestly that is not meant in earnest… . Either the ironist identifies himself with the odious practice he wants to attack,