Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents
1 May 2006 by SeanUpdate #3: Salon’s Editor-in-Chief weighs in on the spineless mainstream media’s (lack of) response to Colbert’s brilliant performance:
Making Colbert go away
The docile press corps was offended when Stephen Colbert dared to expose Bush’s — and their own — feet of clay. But how to respond? Voilà: “He wasn’t funny.”By Joan Walsh
Salon.comMay. 03, 2006 | The only thing worse than the mainstream media’s ignoring Stephen Colbert’s astonishing sendup of the Bush administration and its media courtiers Saturday night is what happened when they started to pay attention to it.
The resounding silence on Sunday and Monday was a little chilling. The video was burning up YouTube, and Salon hit overall traffic heights over the last few days surpassed only by our election coverage and Abu Ghraib blockbusters. But on Monday, Elisabeth Bumiller’s New York Times piece on the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner kvelled over the naughty Bush twin skit but didn’t mention Colbert. Similarly, other papers either ignored the Comedy Central satirist or mentioned him briefly. Lloyd Grove in the New York Daily News pronounced that he had “bombed badly.”
Three days later, the MSM is catching on to Grove’s tin-eared take on Colbert’s performance. Belatedly, it’s getting covered, but the dreary consensus is that Colbert just wasn’t funny. On Tuesday night, Salon’s Michael Scherer, whose tribute to Colbert is everywhere on the blogosphere (thank you, Thank you Stephen Colbert), got invited to chat with Joe Scarborough and Ana Marie Cox, who showed themselves to be pathetic prisoners of the Beltway by passing along the midweek conventional wisdom: The lefty blogosphere can argue all it wants that Colbert was ignored because he was shocking and politically radical, but the truth is, he wasn’t funny, guys! And we know funny!
Regular Joe told us he normally races home to watch Colbert. So the problem isn’t Joe’s conservatism — Joe’s a congenial conservative, a fun-loving conservative, which is why he has Salon folks on all the time (thanks, Joe!). Cox showed why she’s the MSM’s official blogger by splitting the difference. She pronounced Colbert’s performance “fine” but giggled at the left for its paranoia that he’d been ignored for political reasons. Cox and Scarborough mostly just congratulated themselves on being smart enough to get Colbert every night at 11:30, but savvy enough to know he wasn’t completely on his game last Saturday. They barely let Scherer speak.
Similarly, the sometimes smart Jacques Steinberg must have drawn the short straw at the New York Times, where there had to be some internal conversation about the paper’s utter failure to even mention Colbert on Monday. After all, his sharpest jokes involved the paper’s laudable NSA spying scoop, and a funny bit where Colbert offered to bump columnist Frank Rich if Bush would appear on his show Tuesday night — and not just bump him for the night, but bump him off. How could the Times not notice?
In Wednesday’s paper, Steinberg wrote about Colbert’s performance with the angle that it’s become “one of the most hotly debated topics in the politically charged blogosphere” — and only quotes Gawker as an example. He also wanders into the land of comedy criticism to explore the assertion that Colbert wasn’t funny, but quotes not a comic, but New Republic writer Noam Scheiber. Scheiber (who has contributed to Salon) takes a liberal version of the Scarborough approach. “I’m a big Stephen Colbert fan, a huge Bush detractor, and I think the White House press corps has been out to lunch for much of the last five years,” he wrote on the magazine’s Web site. “I laughed out loud maybe twice during Colbert’s entire 20-odd minute routine. Colbert’s problem, blogosphere conspiracy theories notwithstanding, is that he just wasn’t very entertaining.” Chris Lehman makes the same point in the New York Observer, arguing it was a comic mistake for Colbert to fail to break character.
It’s silly to debate whether Colbert was entertaining or not, since what’s “funny” is so subjective. In fact, let’s even give Colbert’s critics that point. Clearly he didn’t entertain most of the folks at the dinner Saturday night, so maybe Scheiber’s right — he wasn’t “entertaining.” The question is why. If Colbert came off as “shrill and airless,” in Lehman’s words, inside the cozy terrarium of media self-congratulation at the Washington Hilton, that tells us more about the audience than it does about Colbert.
Colbert’s deadly performance did more than reveal, with devastating clarity, how Bush’s well-oiled myth machine works. It exposed the mainstream press’ pathetic collusion with an administration that has treated it — and the truth — with contempt from the moment it took office. Intimidated, coddled, fearful of violating propriety, the press corps that for years dutifully repeated Bush talking points was stunned and horrified when someone dared to reveal that the media emperor had no clothes. Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part in the White House correspondents dinner — an incestuous, backslapping ritual that should be retired. For that, he had to be marginalized. Voilà: “He wasn’t funny.”
This is a battle that can’t really be won — you either got it Saturday night (or Sunday morning, or whenever your life was made a little brighter by viewing Colbert’s performance) or you didn’t. Personally, I’m enjoying watching apologists for the status quo wear themselves out explaining why Colbert wasn’t funny. It’s extending the reach of his performance by days without either side breaking character — the mighty Colbert or the clueless, self-important media elite he was satirizing. For those who think the media shamed itself by rolling over for this administration, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war, Colbert’s skit is the gift that keeps on giving. Thank you, Stephen Colbert!
Update #2: Stephen Colbert: instant folk hero. Check it out:
Update: Better, more complete, higher res clips:
BTW, you can see more clearly in these larger clips how red-faced Bush is. Many are suggesting he was drunk. Fact is, he is completely out of his element in situations like this, so it could just be sheer embarrassment. After all, he has the brain of a 12-year-old.
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Absolutely scathing. A must-see.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/04/29.html
Apparently the King and Queen were not amused:
To go in front of that crowd and do satire that biting took serious guts. Word is that, at times, there was almost no laughter — and you notice that on the video.
My favorite gag is the New Orleans/D.C. one. Hilarious.
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1 May 2006, on 7:52 pm
Saw this over at Onegoodmove yesterday. Loved the joke about using your gut, rather than your head, to make decisions. I was absolutely amazed that this would happen considering how good Bush’s cronies usually are at shielding him from criticism. All hail Colbert! That took some serious guts.
1 May 2006, on 7:53 pm
Yeah. We can’t keep up with OneGoodMove or Crooks and Liars. But we do our best to be good also-rans!
1 May 2006, on 9:25 pm
All hail Colbert! That took some serious guts.
I agree!
This was great!
1 May 2006, on 10:50 pm
Sean - thanks for posting this brilliant satire!
Hardly a surprise that most news outlets are hardly mentioning it.
What AMAZING, enviable balls SC has. His show keeps getting better, and this was pure genius.
The “Hindenburg” joke… HAHAHAAAA!
More, please!
1 May 2006, on 10:56 pm
Aw Sean,
Don’t feel bad. Bush is small-fry; you guys are taking down the fucker’s boss.
2 May 2006, on 12:14 am
I don’t know why the links didn’t translate to actually clickable href’s. Teach me to check my post after I push it live.
Anyway, fixed… Click away!
2 May 2006, on 2:17 am
Two thirds empty! Hilarious! That and “68% of the people approve of the job you’re not doing.” Colbert is my current hero.
2 May 2006, on 2:40 am
Thanks, Adam, for mentioning OneGoodMove’s post. I was very busy for most of today but when I at last went looking, I discovered there wear higher res, and complete versions of the clips. I edited my original post to link to them. Worth watching, folks, to get the whole bit, plus revel in the cutaways to Bush’s baffled, slouched-in-his-seat, red-faced idiot ass getting roasted.
2 May 2006, on 11:49 am
I also liked the audience shot of Laurence Fishburn laughing his ass off. That was too priceless. The part I mentioned above (68% approve…), do you think he messed that up on purpose just to involve Dubya? If so, it makes the whole thing that much more brilliant.
2 May 2006, on 2:56 pm
From Salon:
Why Colbert matters
We seldom start a week by sending readers away, but we’ll have to make an exception today: If you haven’t seen Stephen Colbert’s appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, go watch it now.
We shouldn’t have to say that. What Colbert did to the president and the press corps is news: He didn’t shoot anybody Saturday night at the Hinckley Hilton, but he laid them out in just about every other way imaginable. It was as an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment played out with George W. Bush and his court forced to watch, and you ought to have seen it and talked about it and read reporting and analysis on it by now.
It’s not your fault if you haven’t. The Washington Post had a few not-quite-getting-the-point mentions of Colbert’s act, but Colbert didn’t get half the ink the paper spilled on appearances by George Clooney and Morgan Fairchild and other celebrities at Bloomberg’s after-party. The New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller wrote almost 1,000 words on the annual dinner this year, but not one of them was “Colbert.”
The correspondents’ dinner, Bumiller, wrote, is “supposed” to be a time for the president “to make fun of himself in an effort to establish his regular-guy credentials and ingratiate himself with the press.” That’s apparently what Bumiller’s reporting on the dinner was supposed to be, too: one more chance to show what a swell guest Bush would be at our next backyard barbecue. Colbert didn’t play along — he didn’t stick to the story line — so he didn’t get the laughs in the room, and he didn’t get the attention his message deserved in the press.
Why did Colbert matter?
In trying to describe what Colbert did Saturday night, we have a little sympathy for the reporters who didn’t do it themselves. In the core of his performance, standing just feet away from the president, Colbert adopted Bush’s phony or just feckless “from the gut” style of talking and thinking, then revealed it for the international embarrassment that it is. You can’t say something like that without sounding strident and heavy-handed; if you’re a reporter for a major American newspaper, you can’t really say it at all. But over the course of 10 minutes or so — for the president, it must have seemed much longer — that’s what Colbert did. He put the lie to the Bush presidency: Iraq, domestic spying, the outing of Valerie Plame and all the folksy, consistency-and-character crap that’s so often used to legitimize it all.
It’s hard to explain that in a way that would satisfy a desk editor’s balance meter. But that’s assuming that anyone wanted to try. As Colbert made clear in a videotaped sketch, the White House press corps — while showing some signs of life of late — has, over time, been more than complicit in the Imagineering that surrounds this president. It helped sell his case on Iraq. It covered up for him on Plame’s outing. It laughs at his jokes when it should be shining a light on an administration that went to war on a lie, turned a massive surplus into a massive dedicit, and stood by idly as a great American city faced death.
In the video, Colbert fantasized that he was the new White House press secretary, forced again and again to confront the question of why the administration invaded Iraq. Bush used to think that was a pretty funny one; at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner, Bush narrated a slide show of himself searching for those wascally WMD all around the Oval Office and under the cushions of a White House sofa. Some 2,400 dead Americans later, it’s not really har-de-har-har humor anymore.
What it is is tragedy, and Colbert’s video was painful to watch in a what-might-have-been sort of way. There’s a moment where Colbert mashes together tapes of old press briefings to make it sound like all of the White House reporters are asking questions at once — as if the press corps is rising up, as if the administration is being called to answer for all that it has done.
It hasn’t happened that way in real life. The Elisabeth Bumillers of the world can’t even let it happen in fantasy.
– Tim Grieve
2 May 2006, on 4:05 pm
I watched this live when I got wind that Colbert was doing it- laughed my ass off the whole time. I love government and public television.
2 May 2006, on 7:50 pm
MoeHammered, I’m still chuckling and snorting over the Titanic/Hindenberg analogy.
But I wonder why no one is asking/talking about who invited Colbear. Did they not know what he does? Are they still employed? Does anyone know anything?
Another crack in the dike. Drip, drip, drip.
18 June 2006, on 12:22 am
For those who haven’t seen it, Colbert was on Letterman… He talks about this night, and he takes a jab at Bush about 1/3rd of the way through that is priceless:
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/06/dave_letterman_1.html