SC’s humor doesn’t come from that. It comes because the audience (hopefully) gets it. A high school punk who does the caricature is in a completely different context from SC- it’s apples and oranges. A racist does it at the expense of others; SC the person does it because he knows it’s stupid.

As for the earthquake, the timing was odd, but not knowing what went on at the drawing board, it’s really hard to comment on or do anything except speculate.

I’m confused about the assumption that self-censorship is a bad thing.

In the meantime, though, my heart goes out to the victims.

I found nothing insulting about the joke, myself, and do not blame the show’s staff for how others perceived the timing. I find your comparison to The Daily Show’s remaining off-air after 9/11 one of apples to oranges; to say that most of The Colbert Report’s audience would react to a natural disaster and humanitarian crisis in China, however appalling, the same way that they would to a targeted terrorist attack on domestic soil is questionable, I think.

Regardless, since varying viewpoints have now been expressed, I am going to request that further comments on this topic be moved to the Free-for-all thread, if people find it necessary to continue the discussion. In the interest of keeping this a happy site (and my post was intended to be happy, not to generate analysis of whether and when the Colbert staff has been insensitive), further debate on the topic on this post seems ill-advised.

Thanks.

That is all.

In my personal view, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a “misstep” or even tastelessness in comedy. (There is unfunny comedy [Mencia], but that’s a matter of taste and opinion). He may be guilty of bad timing, perhaps, but again you’re taking it like he was insulting China personally when in reality that was probably a story that had been in the pipeline for days.

And it’s not even like he was trying to insult China, like his Ching-Chong character. It was simply, as another commenter said, an oddly timed piece. Your argument of it being an insult to the 9,000+ people dead cannot be used, or he has to take back all of his Nazi jokes, all of his Native American jokes (and I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, so that one hits close to home), or any other joke that features the misfortune of others. Which is pretty much all of them.

Tragedies happen, and I honestly don’t feel that what happened on the show last night had anything to do with what happened in China, and I don’t think that the tragedy in China should have stopped them from doing any joke. Putting any limits on comedy is asking for trouble and self-censorship.

I don’t consider a little Chinese sing-song to be over the line. But when Carlos Mencia said in October 2005 that the people of New Orleans were stupid to live there and got what they deserved — I’d say THAT was over the line. And he got NO flack for that.

Does anyone think they should have cut out the entire Cold War piece and lost 3 minutes of the show? I really don’t see how they could have. (I’m giving TCR staff benefit of the doubt and assuming they did not have an eye on the news Mon afternoon.)