Stephen Colbert in the Zeitgeist (April 2, 2007)

Hi, all! Just jumping in to send a few Colbert-related morsels in your general direction. More to come soon (if work doesn’t kill me first) . . .

The Sound of Satire: Christopher Buckley

• Buckley’s booming satirical voice – The Providence Journal: “A good case can be made for P.J. O’Rourke, but for my money, Christopher Buckley is America’s pre-eminent political satirist. The only others playing in his league are Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart — they’re TV, of course — and the people behind the enviably irreverent site whitehouse.org.

  Boomsday, Buckley’s latest, comes several books after his 1994 Thank You for Smoking, which translated into one of the funniest (and incisive) movies of 2006. Like ‘A Modest Proposal,’ in which Jonathan Swift, the father of modern satire, suggested the Irish could earn money and control population by selling their children to be eaten, Boomsday is premised on a simple and (initially) seemingly ridiculous notion: what if in the not-too-distant future the government offered incentives to aging baby boomers who agreed to kill themselves so that younger wage-earners wouldn’t be stuck with the staggering costs of their elders’ old age?”

Six degrees of Stephen Colbert

• Jon Stewart at UVA: “Nine-time Emmy-winning comedian, Jon Stewart, best known for his political satire as host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart will be performing in Charlottesville for the first time ever! Stewart has made a name for himself as a best-selling author, comedian/actor, and producer. In 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine’s top 100 most influential people and in 2004 was named ‘Entertainer of the Year’ by Entertainment Weekly. John Paul Jones Arena will be in an intimate theater configuration for this event – a limited number of seats will be available.”
• They Call Me Mister Correspondent – The New York Times: “Larry Wilmore, one of the newer fake reporters on ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,’ stakes out his comic targets with the glee and democracy of a kid in a candy store.

  . . .

  Mr. Wilmore began his tenure on the show with a jab at one of the conceits of media. Mr. Stewart introduced him as the ‘black correspondent,’ and he demanded that Mr. Stewart address him as ‘senior black correspondent.’ He is now known as the resident ‘senior black correspondent.’ The joke is that Mr. Wilmore is the show’s only black correspondent.

  He is an easygoing guy who grew up Catholic in suburban Los Angeles (his father is a doctor), developing a taste for social humor.

  ‘Part of that niche on the show is covering some of the topics ‘The Daily Show’ has never had a chance to cover because sometimes you can take it better when it’s from somebody who’s your own kind,’ Mr. Wilmore said. ‘A lot of times when something happens in a black neighborhood, they will send the one black correspondent to cover it. That was our satirical jumping-off point.’

  In some ways his new visibility on a show that has made stars of white male comics like Steve Carell, who now plays the lead on ‘The Office’ on NBC, and Stephen Colbert, who has his own Comedy Central fake news show, ‘The Colbert Report,’ is telling. ‘The Daily Show’ satirizes racial typecasting, but it also has a paucity of nonwhite voices.”

• Reader, Meet Author – DCist: “WEDNESDAY: Fresh off his appearance on The Colbert Report, author Jabari Asim comes to town to discuss his latest effort, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why. We recommend that anyone who still thinks ‘niggardly’ is a racial slur attend. Vertigo Books, 7346 Baltimore Ave., College Park., 7 p.m.”
• Apology for slavery gains a proponent – masslive.com: “In his first months in office, freshman U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Memphis, has introduced resolutions paying homage to Stax Records and Negro League Baseball, and apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans.

  . . .

  Balding, bespectacled and Jewish, Cohen is, visually, a bit of a Woody Allen joke. When he appeared in March on Comedy Central’s ‘The Colbert Report,’ Stephen Colbert intoned in his introduction, ‘With a constituency that is 60 percent black, what proud Nubian son of Africa represents the Ninth?’ A photo of Cohen provided the punch line.

  But, while Cohen does do a spot-on Jack Benny impression, he is a serious, confident figure who has shown considerable fortitude treading the racial fault line in a famously polarized city.”

Gratuitous name dropping

• Sunday Roundup – Huffington Post: “Five and a half years after 9/11, five and a half years after Ari Fleisher warned Americans they “need to watch what they say, watch what they do,” five and a half years after Graydon Carter declared the death of the age of irony, we seem to be living in a Golden Age of political humor, with Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Borat Sagdiev wielding their satiric blades.”
• Jokers of the world, unite! – The Daily News (Galveston County): “Brilliant comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert enjoy acclaim on their Comedy Central pseudo-news shows. Radio still hosts funnymen, although the stylings of Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony and Phil Hendrie all blend reality with outlandish comedy. Often, they do so with raunchy results.”
• Dead show walking – SignOnSanDiego.com: “It’s time to pull the plug on ‘Saturday Night Live’ . . .

  ‘With the war on, it’s tough to be funny like in the Reagan years or the Clinton years, to laugh at things. It’s absolutely impossible for any show to maintain the level ‘SNL’ had for 30 years. That’s a long time on the cutting edge. It’s imitated so much now – ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,’ ‘The Colbert Report.’ It’s not alone in the world.’”

• HP didn’t kill Kona’s charm for Dell’s CEO – Mercury News.com: “WHO NEEDS STEPHEN COLBERT?: Tony Perkins, founder of new media company AlwaysOn Network and before that venture capital magazine Red Herring, has always been something of a Silicon Valley gadfly.

  Some might think he could have been a professional emcee instead.”

• Beaten to the Punch Line – Washington Post: “The Odds Against Female Stand-Up Comedians Are No Laughing Matter

  . . .

  Other than Behar, O’Donnell and DeGeneres (who hosted this year’s Academy Awards), female comics have all but disappeared from daytime television. And outside of Rivers’s run as a guest host on ‘The Tonight Show’ and as the headliner of her own Fox talk show, no woman comic has ever really cracked the late-night talk-TV arena. The late-night shows on weeknights feature the likes of Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, Carson Daly and Bill Maher.

  . . .

  Over the years, Comedy Central’s breakout stars have been such men as Dave Chappelle, Stewart, Colbert, Lewis Black, Steve Carell, Dave Attell and Carlos Mencia. The network was also instrumental in promoting the career of Dane Cook, possibly the hottest stand-up comic of the past few years.”

• In praise of fools – LA Daily News: “APRIL Fools’ Day doesn’t get the respect it deserves, but then again neither do fools. We tend, understandably, to mix fools with being foolish or stupid. This applies only in everyday language. Professional fools and holy fools have a long and honorable tradition. Fools may act silly and, well, foolish, but, underneath, their real job is to speak, sing, rhyme and uncover for the sake of something more profound. They, like impressionist painters, distort ordinary appearances to reveal a deeper truth.

  Though this may run counter to our impressions, our society does not have enough real fools. Lots of idiots and people who try to fool us, but not true fools. Fools, like prophets, have the job of truth-telling – real truth, not just the all-too-common ‘truthiness,’ as one of today’s great fools, Steven [sic] Colbert, puts it.”

• Media watchdog aims to expose flaws of cable news – Daily Freeman.com: “Partly for the sake of sponsors, networks often load up on right-wing pundits because they advocate big business, and shun far-left pundits, even on supposedly liberal stations like CNN, Cohen said. He said the problem with shows like CNN’s ‘Crossfire’ is that the debates are never a true conservative-liberal debate but a conservative-moderate debate.

  ‘You’re not allowed in unless you’re within the corporate spectrum,’ he said.

  Cohen said the off-balance debate structure was especially evident during the build-up to the Iraq war when almost all of the pundits advocated for the war and few spoke against it.

  This utter lack of balance, he said, has driven independent viewers to seek their news on Comedy Central from the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Cohen thinks that says something about the cable media.”