…in the Arts section. (sigh).
It’s a start, I guess. But as you will see, the column is very imprecise and off-target with its reporting:
At issue was a heavily nuanced, often ironic performance by Mr. Colbert, who got in many licks at the president — on the invasion of Iraq, on the administration’s penchant for secrecy, on domestic eavesdropping — with lines that sounded supportive of Mr. Bush but were quickly revealed to be anything but. And all this after Mr. Colbert tried, at the outset, to soften up the president by mocking his intelligence, saying that he and Mr. Bush were “not so different,” by which he meant, he explained, “we’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol.”
Anyone who knows Colbert’s style knows that he is anything but “nuanced”. That is, everyone “gets” his humour if they follow the news and know his shtick. He plays an over-the-top right wing opinionist. He’s “nuanced” if you don’t get the shtick, however (note: I’m not saying Colbert’s style is not sophisticated). This might be an attempt to justify why the press “held back their appreciation” during the performance, perhaps. It was too “nuanced” for them to laugh out loud. Of course, this isn’t the case at all. The audience fully “got” what he was saying.
Alas, the balance in the piece is decidedly against Colbert…
The Times does print a couple of good zingers Colbert gave during his performance. However, the reaction to his performance seems to be quite lop-sided with quotes like these:
Some, though, saw nothing more sinister in the silence of news organizations than a decision to ignore a routine that, to them, just was not funny.
“I’m a big Stephen Colbert fan, a huge Bush detractor, and I think the White House press corps has been out to lunch for much of the last five years,” Noam Scheiber wrote by way of introduction on the New Republic’s Web site. But a few lines later he said: “I laughed out loud maybe twice during Colbert’s entire 20-odd minute routine. Colbert’s problem, blogosphere conspiracy theories notwithstanding, is that he just wasn’t very entertaining.”
Mary Matalin, a Republican who has served the Bush White House as assistant to the president and counselor to the vice president, had a different take.
“This was predictable, Bush-bashing kind of humor,” Ms. Matalin, who was there, said in an interview. Of Mr. Colbert, she said, “Because he is who he is, and everyone likes him, I think this room thought he was going to be more sophisticated and creative.”
Sophisticated and creative? What — like the two Bush routine?
There was noone quoted as saying WHY this was a brilliant performance. There was noone to inform the reader why this is, indeed, cathartic to millions of Americans. There was no real positive analyses of Colbert’s performance at all. Notice that what praise he did get was focused around the fact that he fell flat with the audience.
“It’s very, very tricky,” Mr. Franken, a Democrat who played the dinner twice during the Clinton years but was not there on Saturday, said in an interview. “I thought that what Stephen did was very admirable.”
And what of the “audience”. You know — the other target of Colbert’s attack?
Absolute silence.
LINKS:
After Press Dinner, the Blogosphere Is Alive With the Sound of Colbert Chatter
Bush B Gone posted a report about the NY Times article here (a more forgiving / objective diary about the column):
