There’s a Reason We Slap Our Thighs and Say “I Get It!”
The essence of humor is self-congratulation. This can be benign – I’m so clever, I spot the incongruity! – or malicious – I’m so the guy with his boot on your throat – but self-regard is integral to laughter. To watch Stephen Colbert’s performance before the White House Correspondents’ Club dinner last night is to see a performer relentlessly refusing to let the audience congratulate itself. Hence the relative paucity of laughs from the crowd. The instant Colbert confides in the President from the podium that “I have complete contempt for these people too” and they realize he means it, the audience is lost to him. They were inviting him to join the club, as so many “outrageous” performers before have joined when given the chance, and he spat on their fingers as they prepared to show him the secret handshake. What they wanted was safe, American “of course we can laugh about ourselves, ha ha, it’s the national duty!” pseudosatire. What they got was an ass-ripping by a man who could barely contain his disgust with his surroundings.
It’s a fierce performance, but it’s not great comedy. Colbert’s playing a character who is, at the level of the fiction, not a funny guy. Irony is supposed to happen and the unfunniness of a fictional Bush supporter is supposed to become the funniness of a real Bush – and press – critic. Maybe Colbert just isn’t a good enough actor to pull it off; maybe he’s just not enough of a writer to give the language that extra twist of angular momentum.
The only target of Colbert’s humor who showed a genuine ability to laugh at himself was Scalia. Then again, Scalia was the object of just about the mildest barb going.
It’s interesting to contrast Bush’s own routine in duet with Bush impersonator Steve Bridges. It’s clever and self-deprecating in the shallow way Americans have come to expect from the powerful. It’s basically an extended riff on the commonplace that Bush can’t pronounce big words. The metamessage is “I’m a regular guy and you folks are clever for recognizing my elocution problems which by the way don’t matter at all.” But it flatters the audience, if only in a superficial way, and thereby wins its affection. It’s cute if you don’t think about it too much – if you allow yourself to imagine that you’re in their club as the President allows the diners to imagine that they’re in his. But then the joke’s on you.
(Hot Air link via OTB.)
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April 30, 2006 @ 6:42 pm
VIDEO: White House Correspondents Dinner – President Bush & Impersonator
Last night I mentioned the White House Correspondent’s annual dinner event, and it’s odd guest list. Well, it turned out to be a less funny event than I’ve seen in the past, but President Bush’s “speech” was pretty funny, so…
Comment by Michael —
April 30, 2006 @ 7:21 pm
I’ve seen a variety of reactions. Some on the die-hard left want this to be ”the emperor has no clothes!”, others (like me) think ”funny, but nothing new, a few good jokes (”deckchairs”), the right thinks ”not funny”, and the die-hard freepers think this will offend the center, and drive the wobbly rightists back into the arms of W, causing his approval to return to where it belongs.
What I noticed is that it seems to be breaking out of ”Inside Baseball” circles and into more general circulation.
Comment by Carlos —
April 30, 2006 @ 7:27 pm
”Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.” — Michael O’Donoghue.
Comment by Frank —
April 30, 2006 @ 10:17 pm
Jim- I think you will find it improves on a second viewing. Also you basicly got it, but the people in the room with Steven weren’t his audience, or even a part of his audience, they were his props. With that in mind the performance is substantially more amusing.
Comment by Barry —
April 30, 2006 @ 10:50 pm
”The only target of Colbert’s humor who showed a genuine ability to laugh at himself was Scalia. Then again, Scalia was the object of just about the mildest barb going.”
And Scalia is in the catbird seat. He’s got a SC with four hardcore right-wing justices, who will pretty much carry the day for the next two decades – all that they have to do on any issue is persuade one of five others. No matter how Bush’s presidency crashes and burns, he’s safely out of the blast radius (for any likely result).
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May 1, 2006 @ 3:59 am
[...] ckon Mr Bush might have committed jihad in his heart many times. ELSEWHERE: Nice comments from Jim Henley. Comments so far: [...]
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
May 1, 2006 @ 6:58 am
No, Scalia isn’t. By the time the next four years are over, I think there are non-negligible chances of a) a fascist state that uses Scalia merely as a rubber stamp (perhaps that would be no problem for him), or b) a reaction to Bush’s misdeeds so fierce that Scalia and others are impeached, as scapegoats for installing him if for no other reason.
People tend to think that politics will always go on as they have. But Bush truly is putting us into the realm of possible political system change.
Comment by diddy —
May 1, 2006 @ 8:58 am
Jon Stewart said on Crossfire, ”I’m not going to be your monkey,” that is, I’m not going to be funny just because that is the reason YOU invited me here. I’m going to be myself — do my act — because you invited ME here. Anyone who does otherwise is a pander, a sellout. Considering that the room was full of sellouts, you can see why that might have been the preferred approach. But Jon Stewart’s Daily Show has always primarily been a press criticism show, and Colbert’s show follows the tradition. If anyone expected to get out alive, as someone said upthread, they didn’t understand Colbert’s gig.
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May 1, 2006 @ 9:32 am
Stephen Colbert Rocks the House
Wooow. Stephen Colbert, standing not three feet from the President and First Lady, set off a few tactical nukes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend. Here’s the full transcript, half of the video (UPDATE: full video here, and…
Comment by Barbar —
May 1, 2006 @ 10:55 am
”The government that governs least governs best. By that standard, we’ve done a wonderful job in Iraq…” (paraphrase)
I thought that was wonderful. No, it wasn’t really funny (although other bits of Colbert’s speech were). But that was the point. It was the opposite end of the spectrum from Bush looking under his desk for Iraqi WMDs, much to everyone’s amusement. This shit isn’t funny.
And really, to have someone ten feet from the President, speaking to him directly, and basically saying ”f-you” under the thin veneer of being a comedian playing a parodic right-winger, is absolutely brilliant. Plus the contempt for the press corps. Not quite comedy, but really rather appropriate.
Comment by digamma —
May 1, 2006 @ 2:21 pm
I think the only way Colbert could have made it funnier would have been to make it less biting. Indeed, my favorite part was one of the least funny: ”My favorite bit in the whole thing was ”Over the last five years you people were so good — over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming.” It was funny in a Trigger Happy TV kind of way – the size of the joker’s cojones is the joke.
Comment by Barry —
May 1, 2006 @ 6:44 pm
Rich, in terms of Scalia’s fate, impeachment is out of the question – it’d take a one-in-a-century sea change in US politics to impeach a SC justice; pretty good odds. I don’t think that he’s worried too much about the US going fascist; taking things to the point where the SC becomes an institutional puppet (as opposed to slavish cooperation for partisan political reasonse) would, again, be extreme. It’d take absolute GOP dominance of the US government for another 10 years or so. At that point, Scalia might not even mind – all of his right-wing dreams will have come true, and he can retire to some right-wing ’legal’ school.
Comment by Jeff Bull —
May 1, 2006 @ 6:59 pm
Thank God.
I’ve now been to three liberal blogs and several conservative ones – and I’ve experienced the pain of reading highly predictable reactions.
You got the video, you got the schtick, you understood that – despite what any righty wants to say about ”trying that in front of Saddam Hussein” – few people on the PLANET would have the balls to stand up in a room full of powerful people and exhibit raw contempt for each and every one of them.
Comment by Wild Pegasus —
May 1, 2006 @ 7:03 pm
I think the guy who wrote the scathing rebuke of the Administration’s detention policies and the majority opinion saying that the government couldn’t search your house with heat scanners from the street without a warrant is hardly the guy lining up for a brownshirt.
- Josh
Comment by Justin Slotman —
May 1, 2006 @ 7:55 pm
I blame twenty-plus years of godawful, dishwater weak Saturday Night Live presidential sketches, where the more important thing was always getting the mannerisms down, not actually saying anything meaningful about the president/politician being imitated.
Comment by faboofour —
May 1, 2006 @ 9:04 pm
Here’s two words that shows up your understanding of comedy as facile as best: Andy Kaufman.
The butts of Andy’s performance pieces usually didn’t ”get it” either. His work, however, is still acclaimed by most scholars who know that the art is more than ”that was my wife” one-liners. Colbert’s speech was akin to Andy’s wrestling pieces. It was far from a failure; it was breathtakingly stunning in it’s presentation and execution.
Unfortunately, if you have an investment in the subject of the satire, you probably won’t be able to see that.
Colbert was playing to his audience and from what I’ve been able to tell from the blogosphere, his audience responded enthusiastically. The president and his lapdog press just isn’t part of that audience.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 1, 2006 @ 9:59 pm
faboofour: You’re actually strenuously agreeing with my thesis without realizing it. Go think about how that is, then come back and tell us what you came up with.