Stephen Colbert in the Zeitgeist (May 24, 2007)

Hey, heroes! It’s been a really busy week for me and I’ve been remiss about keeping up with my Colbert-centric tidbits for you, but better late than never, right? Here’s your Zeitgeist for May 24th, 2007.

“The gays”
The After Elton blog puts its stamp of approval on Stephen’s interview with John Amaechi.

• Gay TV round-up: Amaechi, Ford, and Xol talk it up – After Elton: “There have been a bunch of out gay men from all walks popping up on talk shows lately: Tom Ford dropped by Martha to preview his new men’s line and whip up some pecan pralines, out NBA Hall-of-Famer John Amaechi gave Stephen Colbert a few good laughs (and vicey-versey), and gay pop-star-turned-designer Eduardo Xol from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition cooled his heels with the iVilliage people just this morning.

  The most entertaining of the bunch was of course Amaechi on Colbert — both because Amaechi is an unflaggingly charming guest and because Colbert is pretty much as good as it gets when it comes to comedically inspired interviewing. The two guys obviously really hit it off, which is always a pleasure to watch, and Colbert’s repeated references to Amaechi’s being British made a very clever parallel between his born ancestry and his likewise naturally-determined sexuality.”

A comment from Stephen’s favorite “omni-racial” reporter

• CNN’s O’Brien describes her frantic yet fulfilling life – Des Moines Register: “O’Brien also shared stories about colleague David Bloom, who died during coverage of the Iraq war; and answered a question about whether she would leave her husband for faux-television journalist Stephen Colbert, who has sent much on-air ribbing O’Brien’s way on his Comedy Central show, ‘The Colbert Report.’

  ‘No,’ she said with a laugh, ‘but, you know, you never know.’”

In anticipation of tonight’s guest (Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales)

• Wikipedia Revisited – Tech News World:
  

  In response to news that Microsoft paid a consultant to enter favorable postings about the company on Wikipedia, comedian Stephen Colbert hailed “the democratization of knowledge,” where “definitions will greet us as liberators.”

  He followed that with a challenge:

  “This is the essence of Wikilobbying. When money determines Wikipedia entries, reality has become a commodity. … I’ll give five bucks to the first person who goes on [the site] and changes the entry on Reality to ‘Reality Has Become A Commodity.’ To those who say ‘That’s not what Reality is,’ I say ‘Go look it up on Wikipedia.’”

  Colbert has a complicated relationship with the site, which has a lengthy article about his neologism “truthiness.” He has gone so far as to coin another new word based on the Wikipedia philosophy of verifiability, not truth — “wikiality,” a portmanteau of “Wikipedia” and “reality”. His parody site, Wikiality.com, proclaims itself “the Truthiness Encyclopedia! No facts. No reality. No Spelcheck.”

“Yes, and . . .”

• It’s Commencement Season! – FireDogLake: “To the wisdom of the Rev. Mr. Rogers and the compassion of Kermit the Frog, let me give a nod to the theological acumen of Stephen Colbert, speaking last year at Knox College:
  
  I wanted to say something about the Umberto Eco quote that was used earlier from The Name of the Rose. That book fascinated me because in it these people are killed for trying to get out of this library a book about comedy, Aristotle’s Commentary on Comedy. And what’s interesting to me is one of the arguments they have in the book is that comedy is bad because nowhere in the New Testament does it say that Jesus laughed. It says Jesus wept, but never did he laugh.

  But, I don’t think you actually have to say it for us to imagine Jesus laughing. In the famous episode where there’s a storm on the lake, and the fishermen are out there. And they see Jesus on the shore, and Jesus walks across the stormy waters to the boat. And St. Peter thinks, ‘I can do this. I can do this. He keeps telling us to have faith and we can do anything. I can do this.’ So he steps out of the boat and he walks for—I don’t know, it doesn’t say—a few feet, without sinking into the waves. But then he looks down, and he sees how stormy the seas are. He loses his faith and he begins to sink. And Jesus hot-foots it over and pulls him from the waves and says, ‘Oh you of little faith.’ I can’t imagine Jesus wasn’t suppressing a laugh. How hilarious must it have been to watch Peter—like Wile E. Coyote—take three steps on the water and then sink into the waves.

  Mr. Rogers, Kermit, and Stephen Colbert provide a stark contrast to Newt. Newt’s all about the fear, but religiously speaking, I’ll take Mr. Rogers’ love, Kermit’s pleas to care for creation, and Stephen Colbert’s divinely inspired humor any day.”

“Thank you so much, Stephen Colbert”
Hat tip to WordsWithGrace for this entry!

• Public radio’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” celebrates its 20th anniversary today with a collection of favorite moments. From WordsWithGrace‘s email to me:
  

  Of course Stephen’s a part of it! At the very end (around 42:45) she has a montage of moments in which her signature ending to her interviews — “Thank you so much” — doesn’t go as planned. It begins with Bill O’Reilly — true to form, insulting her (“You need to get into another business”), then Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Stephen’s hero Robert Smigel) doing pretty much the same thing, later on Danny Devito asking her to “say that thing…that thing you say…about your show,” and finally Stephen talking over her, then apologizing — “I’m sorry, I interrupted your trademark ‘Thank you so much…’ I was trying to prepare what I would say to you… ‘Me too,’ or ‘So much,’ ‘It was my pleasure’ — I had a whole list of them and now they’re all gone, so let’s just improv this one … Thank you.” Leave it to Stephen to transmute the most mundane exchange into something
  hilarious.

I think she means she wants to be *Bullet*

• Challenging authority – CBC News: “Born to be Word

  I know other people fantasize about being Nicole Kidman (famous), or Donald Trump (rich), or Noam Chomsky (intellectual) or J.K. Rowling (best-selling). Me, I fantasize about being two words on the great satirical show The Colbert Report on The Comedy Channel. I see myself as ‘The Word.’ Stephen Colbert launches into his anti-intellectual, pro-Bush, pro-war, all-American rant, while beside him, supposedly unseen by him but perhaps emerging from another part of his brain, are printed sarcastic responses to his idiocies. ‘Yeah, right,’ says The Word. This creature sits back, smirking. It is snarky, ironic, mocking, devoid of sentiment and utterly subversive.

  That’s my fantasy version of myself, eternally in disagreement with the powers that be. You may call this mad; I could not possibly comment. I just know I was born this way.”

Shout outs, references and gratuitous name dropping

• After hours with GOP’s cat in a hat – Politico.com: “Now there’s talk at the table here about the two Republican debates, the ‘unholy obsession’ with ‘The Colbert Report’ and McKinnon’s love for another ‘Mc.’”
• Movie Review: Fired! – Blogcritics Magazine: “Secondly, Gurwitch tries like hell to be funny in the same vein as the mock interviews done so brilliantly in shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. She fails miserably.”
• Eyebeam Turns 10 – FishbowlNY: “The Daily Show‘s Asif [sic] Mandvi hosted the dinner portion of the evening, doing is best Colbert impression and joking, ‘[The Daily Show producers] fly me around with a green screen, which I never understood.’”
• I’m Staying Home: GEEK MYTHOLOGY – The Portland Mercury: “Stephen Colbert kicks it off: ‘Star Wars came out, and we went to school the next day unable to explain to our friends how everything was different now.’”
• Rome If You Want To: Cullen Murphy – Express (“A publication of The Washington Post“): “The other thing is the willingness to put public officials through the ringer. Satire, I think, is one of the great Roman art forms as it is one of the great American art forms. And the kind of things that we see on television now — [Stephen]) Colbert, Jon Stewart and many others — are really direct analogs of Roman writing. And beyond satire, the way the Romans wrote about public figures is very similar to the way we today write about public figures — if you read someone like Suetonius, his book ‘The Twelve Caesars,’ those are wonderful biographical portraits. You can imagine those pieces appearing in, say, Vanity Fair or The Atlantic or The New Yorker — richly detailed personality portraits — they’re really extraordinary things and very modern, very American, I think.”