He's Stephen Colbert (But He's Not!)
[N]one of "I Am America" rings as uncomfortably true as Colbert's blistering speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, which is reprinted as an appendix here. While the humor in the book at times feels blunted and overly general, at the dinner he had a specific target: President Bush sitting just a few feet away from him and the journalists and politicians in the tables before him…Reading it now, you also can get a sense of the political convictions behind the comedian, the convictions that sharpened his jokes and that emboldened him to make them at such a historically cozy event. Funny as "I Am America" is, it lacks that critical force.Not having read the book, I can't render judgement on whether or not I like it. But I do know there are myriad reasons why Stephen Colbert is fascinating: his razor-sharp satire; his deadpan delivery; his speed-of-light quick wit.
But I've got my own reason for being fascinated by Colbert: He's an enigma.
That's right. The guy who's seemingly ubiquitous from magazine covers to ice cream containers to presenting Emmy Awards?
An enigma.
Somehow, in the multimedia/blogistan/500 channel world, very few people know who Stephen Colbert is. Sure, everybody with a TV (or just an Internet connection, actually) and a pulse knows who "Stephen Colbert" is, but take away the quotation marks and he's nearly an unknown. That's completely a strategy, I understand, to maintain the persona in the public's mind. But it's also a shame.
As Seth Mnookin writes in the current Vanity Fair -- and yes, in the magazine world, current always means last month's, I know – the carefully-kept line between Colbert's public and private lives is getting rubbed out:
Colbert isn't a big fan of discussing his personal life with the media. He's compared the press to a "lamprey that latches onto a subject and just sucks and sucks and sucks until your brain and your soul is as dry as a crouton." That's one of the reasons he does many of his interviews in character. "I like preserving the mask," he says. "Stepping out from behind it doesn't do me any good." But he also recognizes that he is expected, as an increasingly well-known public figure, to let the world know at least a little bit about his private life.Colbert's real life story is one of overcoming great tragedy and coming out with extraordinary perspective. And rather than summarize and convey them to you, I'll point you to a few clips from his exchange with Charlie Rose late last year.
We're at a curious point in MediaLand and American culture – and postmodernism, too, but I'm not going to turn Public Eye into a grad school seminar – where Inside Jokes are becoming a genre of entertainment. David Addison turning to the camera and rolling his eyes in "Moonlighting" was groundbreaking in the mid-'80s, but commonplace now. Borat makes fools of frat boys, and the only people who don't 'get it' are the subjects of the interview themselves.
Stephen Colbert is taking us even deeper down the rabbit hole. "Stephen Colbert" a polemicist and we know it, he knows it, and the guest knows it. Stephen Colbert has turned the Inside Joke into an Inside/Out Joke, and we get the chance to laugh at the farce of it all.
It's funny. The very first monologue on "The Colbert Report" began with "Colbert" explaning the purpose of the show. As Mnookin recounts:
"This show is not about me," Colbert explained his first night on the air. "No, this program is dedicated to you, the heroes.… On this show your voice will be heard, in the form of my voice."And it's here – at the very beginning – that the Inside/Out-edness of Colbert's performance comes full circle. No, the show is not about Colbert; it's about "Colbert." But by mocking MediaLand's outrage culture nightly, he expresses his frustration at it all (albeit in a multilayered format) on our behalf.
I don't know if that makes us 'heroes,' but it makes for great TV.