As a more reasonable follow up to some of the doom and gloom pronouncements for what will happen to The Daily Show and, more particularly, The Colbert Report once the elections are over, NPR weighs in with this interesting piece:

Your Principles Or Your Obsequiousness: Which Would ‘Stephen Colbert’ Choose?
by Marc Hirsh

Elections are easy. Comedy is hard. Especially comedy that hinges more or less directly on the outcome of elections …

If McCain wins, of course, then it’s business as usual. But the prospect of an Obama victory raises a much more interesting dilemma: how will “Stephen Colbert” react?

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be any question about it. The Colbert character has spent the entire election cycle warning Americans that Obama is a secret Muslim who, if elected, will be sworn into office on a gay baby and invite all of his terrorist buddies to sleep on the White House couches. So Colbert is going to take that and run, right? He’ll report to his viewers from a nightmare world existing entirely in his own imagination, a pundit ranting hysterically against the system?

Maybe. But here’s what’s interesting about Colbert’s options in a post-Obama world: he could choose to go in exactly the opposite direction and still be entirely consistent with the character he’s spent three years perfecting. That’s because “Colbert,” as longtime viewers know — the character, that is, and not the performer — is marked by a tendency to blindly accept whatever authority is placed in front of him. Much of his slavish praise of George W. Bush has come from a position that it’s un-American to question the President. After all, that’s what makes him the President, isn’t it?

Not only that, “Colbert” is a follower, willing to jump on whatever bandwagon seems to have the most momentum and then shouting the loudest to make it seem like he was there first.

. . .

So is “Stephen Colbert,” at his core, an ideologue or a sycophant? Perhaps only Stephen Colbert, the one without the quotation marks, knows which one it’ll be.

Read the full article here

Intriguing! Mr. Hirsch is clearly an it-getter and has given some actual thought to Stephen’s character — I’m looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

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