Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.
Kids these days, they have it so easy. Why, Michael O’Donoghue had to mock My Lai and savage Laraine Newman and make the Mormon Tabernacle choir scream in agony and die of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, obscure and half-remembered, to soldier through the sort of shocked silences Stephen Colbert got just by standing up in front of the president and the press and telling the fucking truth. —What does it mean that it isn’t our journalists anymore but our comedians who afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted? Pretty much what it always has, I guess. At least someone’s making an effort.
When John Stewart mentioned Colbert’s appearance last week I had two simultaneous yet contradictory reactions: “Do they realize whom they have picked?” and “Has Colbert sold out?”
Well, no to the latter. The former is based on my longtime appreciation of Colbert’s work. He’s too smart, too well informed and too subversive to just walk up and make Bob Hope jokes. Stewart did one of these events last year or the year before; he, too, was incisive, but Stewart is also self-effacing, he pulls his punches once in a while. Colbert is also very polite, which makes him friends among the plutocrats, but he only so to let out enough rope for his interlocutors to hang themselves.
I’m glad Colbert didn’t let me down.
stewart and colbert play so well off of each other that it’s creepy sometimes. colbert sticks to character tremendously, which stewart doesn’t so much.
i was always amazed the way he did the “this week in god” segment, and still wish they would bring it back.