I love it when something controversial happens and peoples justification is, “Well, it’s ‘Stephen Colbert’ sophisticated.” Heh – they have no idea. Anyway, here’s some blips and blurps about Stephen from the past few days in the Zeitgeist.

The New Yorker is no Stephen Colbert

  • David Remnick On That New Yorker Cover: It’s Satire, Meant To Target “Distortions And Misconceptions And Prejudices” About Obama – Huffington Post:

    Prior to greenlighting the cover, did you consider that it might be co-opted by Obama opponents as anti-Obama propaganda? If so, did that possibility give you pause?

    It always occurs to you that things will be misinterpreted or taken out of context — that’s not unusual. But I think that’s the case of all political satire, whether it’s Art Spiegelman or Thomas Nast or Herb Block or Jon Stewart. I bet there are people who watch Stephen Colbert and think he’s a conservative commentator, or maybe they did at first….a lot of people when they first saw Colbert said, “What is this? ” What he was doing was turning things on [their] head.

  • The death of parody: Obama and that New Yorker cover – The Big Picture:

    “If Blitt’s cartoon doesn’t re-energize the debate over political correctness in this country, it is hard to say what will. Terms like “offensive” and “tasteless”, used by both Obama and McCain, intimate political correctness because that’s what people expect them to say. It hurts to be reminded how well we have allowed politics to degenerate into an unremitting torrent of blatant stereotypes and sound bites. We react negatively to such a cartoon, because we no longer understand the visual metaphors at play here. Everything must be taken literally, because that’s that way we can always hold the moral high ground. The initial reaction to the cartoon suggests that America is losing its capacity to detect sarcasm and no longer values parody unless it’s done by John Stewart or Stephen Colbert. We cannot find it within ourselves to examine our own cultural biases enough to understand that Blitt’s cartoon has a long history in American political humor. As a form of parody and humorous exaggeration, the cartoon is intended to push some buttons. We are supposed to look at it and see the attacks on Obama what they are — mean-spirited and fear-raising. “

  • New Yorker editor defends controversial Obama cover – CNN.com:

    ” Remnick also defended his publication’s use of satire in general, likening it to the work of popular television hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. “If there’s no possibility for satire, if you always have to look for the joke that every — absolutely everyone will get, you won’t have Jon Stewart, you won’t have Stephen Colbert,” he said.

    “Stephen Colbert goes on and mocks right-wing commentary by pretending to be a right-wing commentary. In a way this is Colbert in print.”

    And not everyone finds the illustration over the top.”

Stewart fans vs. Colbert fans online

  • Leah Talks With Audrey Chen About Bringing IA to Comedy Central – Adaptive Path:

    Leah: So many sites struggle to build a community, whereas you come with this huge community almost built in. I’m sure there’s a lot of enthusiasm there that you can harness to make a really interesting experience, but sometimes that enthusiasm can be challenging, too. How do you think about community?

    Audrey: There’s a huge amount of goodwill behind the Daily Show and Colbert, and a lot of our properties. But specifically with community what’s interesting is if you look at the Daily Show crowd versus the Colbert Report crowd. Obviously there’s a lot of overlap, but the Daily Show is much more a straight news show, whereas the Colbert Report is about his personality, and he’s constantly soliciting the crowd. He’s asking the crowd to do things for him, with him, send him stuff. That means the web presence of Colbert is huge. For the Daily Show, we become stewards of the content and a little bit less of the community, which makes our job a little bit easier. It also makes Colbert incredibly, incredibly daunting. As we’re looking at what kind of value we can add, the community has already done so much. They’ve indexed the site. They’ve started their own campaigns. And because they’ve done so much, it’s really hard to see where we can add a lot of value in there. Whereas with the Daily Show, we could think less about that and more just strictly about how do we add value through the content itself. That’s a much easier task.

  • Country, the city version: Farms in the sky gain new interest – International Herald Tribune: Former ‘Colbert Report’ guest gets a serious online bump

    “Some criticism is quite helpful. Stephen Colbert jokingly asserted that vertical farming was elitist when Despommier appeared in June on “The Colbert Report,” a visit that led to a jump in hits to the project’s Web site from an average of 400 daily to 400,000 the day after the show.”

Gratuitous Name Dropping

  • Anonymous Comments Might Not Be So Anonymous – cshel.com: I kinda love this woman on multiple levels for her comments about trolls, but she did do a bit of name dropping too

    “Since I can’t email directly back to this guy, I shall take advantage of my little soap box here to issue my response… and then I’ll print out my reply and snail mail it to the FEMA office in Indianapolis to the attention of whomever is listed as being in charge of said office, just so that the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Indiana is aware of how their tax-payer-funded resources are being used. Maybe if I’m feeling particularly snarky, I’ll cc the Washington DC office (and maybe the Colbert Report since way more people pay attention to Colbert anyway).”

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