And thus, both O’Reilly and Russert looked silly, huffing and puffing at a straw target that refused to be blown away. Instead, they proved the point Colbert most wanted to hammer home — that just as he was “playing” Stephen Colbert the pontificating TV host, they were playing their roles, as well. And by surrendering valuable television time to Colbert, they were playing it somewhat irresponsibly.
And in playing the irrepressibly obsequious grasshopper to O’Reilly’s (unknowing) master, Colbert makes it awfully difficult for O’Reilly to hit back. “You know what I hate about people who criticize you?”, Colbert asked O’Reilly one night on The O’Reilly Factor. “They criticize what you say, but they never give you credit for how loud you say it, or how long you say it.”
Door-to-door mockery
Colbert can, and does, bait liberals just as often, and just as boldly. When Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem visited The Colbert Report to promote a new radio-talk network for women, Colbert ushered them to a cooking set, where they could continue to chat — while making and baking a pie. The name of the segment? “Cooking with Feminists.” He even wore a “Kiss the Cook” apron — though Fonda got the better of him, finally, by taking the apron’s advice to heart and kissing him, which left him smiling and uncharacteristically speechless. Fonda, sensing a weakness, explored and exploited it upon her next Colbert Report visit, immediately crossing from her side of the table to pounce on Colbert (as a good cougar would) and spend the entire interview on his lap, kissing and nuzzling him into near incoherence. Score one for the feminists, and for the validity of that old 1960s strategy, “Make love, not war.” (All that and more, by the way, is available on the new Best of The Colbert Report DVD from Comedy Central.)
Colbert isn’t often flustered, however. Whether he’s eviscerating congresspersons — and their constituencies — in his ongoing 435-part series Better Know a District (most famous victim: Democratic Florida congressman Robert Wexler, whom Colbert jokingly corralled into saying, “I enjoy cocaine because it’s a fun thing to do”) or announcing his on-its-face ludicrous run for the presidency, Colbert usually is entertaining with one hand and slapping his chosen subject with the other.
He’s not deterred easily, either. Running for president of the United States is hard enough, especially when you aren’t allowed on the ballot of the one state to which you applied — and harder still when your very pulpit, a post-prime-time cable TV show, is stopped cold by a Hollywood writers’ strike. Yet at each step, Colbert got his laughs, and made his points.
The night Colbert announced his candidacy on his own show, he lampooned the pompous ritual politicians often undergo by preceding his announcement to “run” with the revelation that, “after nearly 15 minutes of soul-searching, I have heard the call.”
After South Carolina rebuffed his efforts to get on the official ballot, Colbert sent out an official statement in lieu of granting interviews:
“I am shocked and saddened by the South Carolina Democratic Executive Council’s 13-to-3 vote to keep me off their presidential-primary ballot,” he said. “Although I lost by the slimmest margin in presidential election history — only 10 votes — I have chosen not to put the country through another agonizing Supreme Court battle. It is time for this nation to heal.”
Then, shrewdly folding the effect of that day’s strike announcement into his narrative, Colbert added: “I want to say to my supporters, This is not over.
“While I may accept the decision of the Council, the fight goes on! The dream endures! . . . And I am going off the air until I can talk about this without weeping.”
The very next day, out giving a speech but no longer doing his TV show, Colbert told the crowd, “I’m looking into the legality of mocking the candidates door to door.”
While so much of what Colbert says is intentionally outrageous, his stated goal of “mocking the candidates” is very close to the truth. Mocking them while simultaneously mocking the media circus that surrounds, anoints, and destroys them. Colbert, by wanting to run for president (run, not be), sought to lampoon the process, mingle with actual voters and fellow nominees, and use humor as a weapon to deliver some serious messages and warnings about our politics and our politicians. When the writers’ strike is over, even without getting on a single ballot, Colbert is likely to pick up the gauntlet somehow. It’s too funny — and too serious — not to. Expect him to resurface, with a campaign that relies only on write-in votes, the old Pat Paulsen way.
And if this next election year doesn’t work out, there’s always 2028. Just ask Will Rogers.
“The thing that stopped our party,” Rogers wrote in 1928, in his final Life magazine column about his playful Anti-Bunk Party run for the presidency, “is that we are a hundred years ahead of our times . . .
“In the year 2028,” he continued, “the acceptance speeches will read: ‘I pledge myself, if elected, to appoint a Committee to look into the condition of the farmer, to keep the tariff so that it will protect the most voters, and absolutely pledge myself to take the question of Prohibition right out of politics.’ ”
All these years later, there’s a certain amount of truthiness to that. There’s a certain amount of Will Rogers in Colbert, and a big chunk of Paulsen, too. In 1968’s Pat Paulsen for President special, a politician introducing Paulsen told the crowd, “Will Rogers never met a man he didn’t like. Pat Paulsen never met a woman he didn’t like.”
And Stephen Colbert, it seems, never met a person he couldn’t skewer.
In one of his last Colbert Report shows before the strike, Colbert introduced a fellow dark-horse candidate — chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, running an opposition campaign for president of Russia — by announcing, “Finally! Someone else who sees the world in black and white!”
It’s a good chess joke — but as an accurate description of the way the real Colbert sees things, and operates, it’s not even close. Shades of gray, and moving behind enemy lines — that’s where the fun is. And in that game, Colbert is a grandmaster himself, always thinking several moves ahead, and always poised to attack.
David Bianculli is TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air and for tvworthwatching.com. He can be reached at davidbianculli@comcast.net.