Saturday, October 22, 2005
Pretty much everything you need to know about the spiritual headwaters of “The Colbert Report,” Comedy Central’s hilarious new addition to its nightly fake news lineup, was made clear when Bill O’Reilly, the preening, preternaturally outraged host of Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor” paid a visit to “The Daily Show” on Tuesday night.
“Let me ask you a question,” host Jon Stewart began. “Why so angry?”
O’Reilly led with a variation on his I’m-here-for-you riff, intoning something about how “we’ve gotta take on a lot of bad people . . . we have to bring a sense of outrage to the table.”
But this just prompted Stewart to burst into laughter. Possibly because he knew that O’Reilly had just provided “Daily Show” alumnus Stephen Colbert with a pitch-perfect demonstration of what “The Colbert Report” mocks so brilliantly.
Just the night before, at the start of his first episode, Colbert had laid out his philosophy in precisely the same terms.
“This program is dedicated to you, the heroes!” he shouted at the camera. “You’re not the elites. You’re not the country club crowd. I know for a fact that my country club would never let you in!”
Colbert, or more accurately, the alter-ego he honed during his years as senior senior correspondent of “The Daily Show,” reflects virtually all of the tics and tropes that O’Reilly and his brethren (see also: CNN’s Nancy Grace, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Fox’s Geraldo Rivera, and on and on) use to transform the day’s news, no matter what it is, into pulse-pounding us-against-them material.
“Anyone can read the news to you,” Colbert declared. “I promise to feel the news at you.”
In other words, Colbert is one of those guys who won’t let the facts get in the way of his righteous indignation. Kind of like O’Reilly, who during Tuesday’s “Daily Show” interview launched into another of the angry denunciations of France he’s been unreeling since the walk-up to the Iraq war. When Stewart noted that France’s main reason for not joining the U.S. coalition — they didn’t believe the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — were correct, O’Reilly blinked, uncomprehending. What difference did that make?
“I don’t trust books. They’re all fact and no heart, and that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart,” Colbert had said on Monday. “We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.”
Colbert — or, more precisely, the alter ego he plays on TV — is a political creature, but not exactly partisan. The positions he takes are fueled less by a traceable ideology than a freewheeling egocentrism he usually asserts in the time-honored tradition of men who describe their courage in terms of an intimate body part. When Wednesday night guest Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, mentioned that he considered himself to be a political centrist, Colbert cut him off: “Isn’t a centrist someone who doesn’t have the (guts) to be a fanatic?”
If Colbert is a fanatic about anything, it’s Colbert. His glossy set is a multimedia tribute to himself, from the many representations of his name that flash around him (aerial shots reveal that his desk is a large ‘C’) to the oil portrait that shows the anchor posed before another portrait of himself.
All of which is beyond ludicrous, of course. But in a week in which a) O’Reilly calls for the destruction of the Dallas Morning News because one of its columnists insulted him, b) The New York Times’ distressingly shifty Judith Miller presents herself as a martyr to the First Amendment, and c) Fox’s Rivera continues to grumble about the Times’ idiotic misrepresentation of his typically brazen turn as an on-camera wheelchair-lifter in stricken New Orleans (he didn’t really nudge anyone out of the way!), well, it’s not that much of a stretch.
Amazingly, Colbert-the-comic-actor’s portrayal of Colbert-the-commentator is unfailingly charming. You’d expect him to be grating (sort of like fellow “Daily Show” alumnus Steve Carrell’s character on NBC’s “The Office”). But there’s a twinkle in his eye, and he stops short of bullying his guests. Instead, he acts like an amiable moron, and if they choose to follow him (like the white Georgia congressman who on Monday agreed that spending a year in Africa as a toddler made him African American and thus particularly sensitive to the plight of the underclass), that’s their business.
What makes “The Daily Show” and now “The Colbert Report” so indispensable is how their brand of absurdist humor so easily brings out the real absurdism in today’s political/journalist culture. If some politicians are going to build their careers by retailing fake news to self-adoring fake journalists, it apparently takes a fake news show to reveal how phony the whole enterprise has become.
Peter Ames Carlin: 503-221-8562; [email protected]