There have been about 1000 blog posts about Stephen Colbert’s sendup at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, but I think I have something extra to offer because, in some small way, I’ve been there.
I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for over a decade, primarily of the political variety. I’m obviously not at Colbert’s level, but I’ve had my share of success, however meager. I’ve also had my share of moments exactly like Stephen did on Saturday night: playing to a crowd whose worldview is actively hostile to your own.
In Indiana, Wisconsin, Sacramento, Orange County, Iowa, in small towns and even sometimes in big ones, I’ve been in that situation. I’ve come off stage to hear someone say “Why? Why did he have to say those things?” I did a show in Vacaville, CA (home of Cindy Sheehan, I believe, and it’s no slam on the city, this actually happened) where I did a joke about Shakespeare and someone in the crowd yelled “Shakespeare? We’re from Vacaville!” I’ve been in those spots where from the first second on stage I’ve known that I have nowhere to go.
Other comics have somewhere to go, a bag of tricks of dick jokes and crowd work they can tap into. I don’t want to do that. I have no problem with bombing in an effort to reach people who may not be inclined to listen to me. In fact, forcing them to listen is sometimes an end in itself.
What Stephen Colbert did the other night is a textbook example of “playing to the back of the room.” It’s all the more courageous because there actually wasn’t a back of the room there; they were all at home, a few of them watching on C-SPAN, others finding the Quicktime later. I know he was quoted as saying that the whole thing was “just for laughs,” but he clearly made a conscious effort that he was not going to change his act to satisfy the audience. He wasn’t going to the audience, he was going to let them come to him. And if they didn’t, oh well. I remember Joel Hodgson of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” fame (who I had the pleasure of meeting recently) once say “We don’t wonder ‘will people get this,’ we say ‘The right people will get this.'”
I’m not surprised that the right side of the blogosphere has come out and said “Colbert wasn’t funny,” and used the reaction of the crowd as proof. Everybody on the planet thinks they have a sense of humor and good taste in clothes. It’s mathematically impossible that everyone does. I can say from experience that some of my best shows have been the ones that could rightly be described as bombing. Almost always after one of those shows someone comes up and says “I thought you were awesome.” Certainly that is not the state of comedy today. Today’s “anything for a laugh” comedy of Dane Cook and others has at its core a belief that failure is not an option. Colbert understood that failure is not failure.
That was the edgiest, bravest set I’ve seen since the death of Bill Hicks. The only quibble Hicks would have had with it was that he did it in the first place. “Those shitheels don’t deserve to have that much truth thrown in their face,” I could imagine him saying. But it was entirely necessary, in my view. There are two different kinds of satire, Horatian and Juvenalian. Juvenalian satire attacks folly in very direct terms. Horatian satire presents folly for what it is, and is generally seen as more gentle. But it’s not in the hands of a master satirist. Colbert is a Horatian satirist, taking on the persona of the right-wing blowhard in order to expose its lunacy from within. It’s one thing to tell an anti-Bush joke, it’s another thing to espouse a pro-Bush line of reasoning and have that be the joke itself; the former is just a joke, while the latter attacks an entire worldview and crushes it.
It’s something of a relief that we live in a society where this kind of thing can happen twenty feet from the President, and nobody’s killed for it (at least not so far). In a way it hearkens back to the court jesters of old, who mocked the king and his court, but only because he was the only one allowed to do so. Through comedy and satire we can reach human truths that we normally cannot in blunt speech. It’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. The less sugar you put in, the more acrid and biting the medicine tastes. In my mind that makes it all the more brilliant. Thankfully there are still people like Stephen Colbert willing to serve that up.
