SUBMITTED BY ELAINE MAGLIARO
I am a BIG fan of Stephen Colbert and his show The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. On his show, Colbert takes on the persona of a Bill O’Reilly type television character. I think Colbert is one of the best comedy talents of our times. He is intelligent, sharp, fearless, a master of satire…and he drives Bill O’Reilly crazy. What’s not to love about the man?
Stephen Colbert mocks Bill O’Reilly to his face
Colbert has signed a five-year contract. I sure hope he’ll be able to do the same kinds of things on a major network that he’s been able to do on Comedy Central.
Stephen Colbert EPIC Response to Cancel Colbert – #CancelColbert – 3/31/2014
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Stephen Colbert Named Letterman Replacement (Business Insider/Yahoo)
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Flowers For Socrates 
Why Stephen Colbert is Dangerous — and Invaluable
*April 10, 2014 * |
Fox bully Bill O’Reilly used to at least pretend to play along with Stephen Colbert’s satire. The man Colbert lampooned as “Papa Bear” periodically even left his Fox den and came over to Comedy Central to sit down with Colbert, to be a good sport, as though he could handle satire as homage, the price of his fame.
O’Reilly’s fame has only grown over the years, but his ability to tolerate Colbert’s spoof has withered. O’Reilly has emerged as the angry red face of white grievance, our greatest race hustler, telling his older, white male audience that they’re right to resent our black president and the changing America he leads. This meaner, angrier Bill O’Reilly is no longer tolerating Colbert’s satire but shrilly campaigning against him, with a meltdown on Tuesday night that called the comedian a “deceiver” peddling “shameful” lies that “damage” the country.
What set him off? A relatively harmless spoof of the Fox host’s recent freak-outs over the politics of inequality. A classic O’Reilly exercise in bad faith, his segments have asserted that Democrats want to make everybody “equal,” and since he’ll never play basketball like Shaquille O’Neal, or be as kind as Mother Teresa, equality is impossible and Obama and the Democrats are destroying a once-great nation by demanding it.
Colbert captured O’Reilly’s trademark faulty logic and paranoia by making a long list of things O’Reilly will never be “equal” to – he’ll never be “as mature as a toddler,” for instance – and concluded that because the Fox host will never play basketball as well as Shaq, “the top 1 percent should control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.” It was a jaunty spoof of the way rich Republicans deliberately misrepresent the goals of people who are concerned that we’ve returned to Gilded Age levels of income inequality.
And O’Reilly lost it. He attacked Colbert as “one of the biggest mouthpieces for the progressive movement” and “the darling of the far-left Internet.” (He obviously slept through the #CancelColbert controversy.) He accused him of believing in the version of equality practiced by communist China and the former Soviet Union.
Like many ideological fanatics, Colbert is misguided in the extreme … He’s a true progressive believer playing exclusively to other believers. Colbert can be dismissed as clueless, but the guy does do damage because he gives cover to powerful people who are selling Americans a big lie that this country is bad.
Watching O’Reilly’s meltdown made it viscerally clear why it was so hard for me to watch the #CancelColbert car crash, at every level. It’s not that I think every one of Colbert’s jokes is funny. It’s not that he never gets anything wrong. I speak as someone who was personally mocked as a crazy liberal -with a short clip of my talking about “gun nuts” on MSNBC — during Colbert and Jon Stewart’s misguided October 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity.” I didn’t enjoy that.
But I enjoyed it much less when the unhinged O’Reilly told me I had blood on my hands for defending Dr. George Tiller after he was murdered by an antiabortion zealot, and thousands of O’Reilly-bots came after me with threatening, abusive email, social media comments and good old-fashioned snail-mail hate mail. Now O’Reilly has marked Colbert as an enemy, too, and not merely a competitor. Colbert is under his skin, and I’m grateful for that.
For four nights a week, over the last nine years, Colbert has calmly and brilliantly inhabited a persona that puts him in the psyche of delusional, entitled, wealthy conservative white men like O’Reilly, bullies who want their country back, and are willing to do plenty of damage as they try (but ultimately fail) to retrieve it. Hey, it’s only humor, but it’s made it clear to those bullies that time, and demography, are their enemies, and it’s made it harder for them to recruit young people, particularly young white people, to their right-wing backward-looking pity party. That’s important.
Those bullies see Colbert clearly as an ally to progressive causes and a threat to their privilege, and that should be just as clear to progressives. Sadly we’re having a moment when it’s OK to suggest we don’t want certain people on “our side,” even if they want to be on “our side,” and that bewilders me. I just know I’m on Colbert’s side.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-stephen-colbert-dangerous-and-invaluable
04.10.14
Yes, Stephen Colbert Will Be Great as Host of CBS’s ‘Late Night’
Colbert is officially replacing Letterman as the new ‘Late Show’ host. Of course he’ll drop the character and he’ll get the ratings. But will we let him leave the ‘Report’ behind?
Whenever a late-night TV host announces his retirement, there’s inevitably speculation about who will be crowned the next king of the 11:30 time slot. This in turn has created tremendous interest in a response from me. OK, nobody asked, but it seems appropriate for me to weigh in on one of the few issues I can actually be considered an expert on.
I know Stephen Colbert, and I’ve known most of his staff—because I was part of it. For more than six years and well over 1,000 episodes, I entertained the live studio audience of The Colbert Report. Every night, I went out in front of the most devout members of the “Colbert Nation” and entertained them with a mix of stand-up and improv. It was the best job in comedy I’ve ever had.
Now, with it oficcial that CBS has chosen Colbert to replace David Letterman, it remains to be seen whether he can slip the skin of a character he’s been playing so successfully on Comedy Central. Here’s what matters in evaluating the prospects.
Was Colbert interested in the Late Show? Why wouldn’t he be? Even if he wasn’t, he is too smart to let on. Contract negotiations are far more lucrative when you can demand every last penny from your current gig by letting the sides sweat or fight it out.
Will it work? That, of course, is the most important question everyone is asking, so that is where the fun starts.
Colbert is perhaps the greatest comedian of our generation of comics. He can do it all: improv, sketch, stand-up. He can dance, act, and conduct hilarious interviews.
What viewers don’t see is how integral Colbert is to the writing process. Only the writing staff knows whose contributions end up making the show, but you can be sure Colbert has the last say.
The most impressive feat I saw him pull off in my six years at the Report was when he did the show with no writers at all during the writers’ strike of 2007-08. He and his executive producer and former head writer Allison Silverman wrote the show themselves, and in case that doesn’t seem impossible enough, union rules didn’t allow scripts to be loaded in the teleprompter. He wrote the show, then somehow remembered it. I’ll never forget standing backstage and watching him pull that off almost flawlessly night after night.
His current fans will follow him anywhere, and a more accessible variety format will attract new legions.
Colbert has always taken huge risks. He is as fearless as any entertainer of our time, and that is where he gets the most respect from the comedy community.
The greatest measure of his talent, however, is how well he has been able to play the “Stephen Colbert” of The Colbert Report. One can and should argue that playing a character like the one he invented is difficult, even in a five-minute sketch. His ability to sustain this character for so long is what ultimately blows us away. This is a feat he has admitted he was concerned about in the beginning.
Colbert has done this by constantly surprising his fans and audiences. He has reinvented the character so often that he’s never become stale or predictable. He has taken his “Colbert Nation” on a journey that brought us to the Iraq War, the Vancouver Olympics, and the deck of the Intrepid aircraft carrier, to name a few. He has performed with legendary musicians such as Tony Bennett, Barry Manilow, Michael Stipe, and Brian Eno.
Some of Colbert’s best work has actually taken place on other stages and networks. Every night before the show, he does a Q&A with the studio audience. For years, the most frequently asked question was about the 2006 White House correspondents’ dinner, where he infamously “entertained” the president of the United States. They usually wanted to know what President Bush said to him afterward. (If you want to know the answer, you can go to a taping of the Reportand ask him.)
Also amazing was his speech/act at the 2012 Time 100 gala, where he gave his friend and fellow Catholic Cardinal Dolan a beautiful ribbing.
Colbert and Jon Stewart even took us to the D.C. mall for a live, outdoor theatrical experience for a “Rally to Restore Sanity” to the place. Colbert has deftly hosted benefits and other shows and given hilarious and poignant commencement speeches. He’s won almost every award, including numerous prized Emmys, some as a writer on The Daily Show and now breaking that show’s streak to win two for The Colbert Report.
Can Colbert drop the character and still succeed? Of course. Hosting the Reporthas always been far more difficult than a late night network-style talk show. But can he just be himself and be a success? Inside his slick suits, Colbert possesses every weapon and trick a comedian can utilize. As long as it’s the same guy in the same suits, Colbert will more than hold his own on CBS.
More than anything else, a talk show host needs to be “likable” the way Jay Leno always was. More sophisticated fans of comedy will want to demand an “edge” to the material and performance as well. Having both is tough, but not at all impossible. There are quite a few who do that well, including Jimmy Kimmel, Howard Stern, and of course Jon Stewart.
Colbert’s comedic integrity has never been questioned, and he has been able to make us laugh and think every night for years while not only liking but loving him at every moment.
Will he win the ratings game? I bet he will.
But will we let him leave the Colbert of the Report behind? He has developed a unique brand, accompanied by loyalty reserved for fewer and fewer entertainers these days. His current fans will follow him anywhere, and a more accessible variety format will attract new legions.
Colbert and his class of late night hosts have collaborated and appeared on each other’s shows often, sometimes even as a running bit. Some have suggested Letterman needed Leno as competition to bring his A-game night after night. Kimmel, Stewart, and Colbert all share a manager and a comradely respect for each other. Colbert and Kimmel have collaborated for hilarious bits quite a few times, along with Conan O’Brien.
At the end of Jimmy Fallon’s first Tonight Show episode, he did a hilarious bit pretending he’d won a bet with some of the most recognizable faces in entertainment. They marched onstage and paid the new host off. Not for nothing, Fallon ended his impressive parade of stars that night with none other than Stephen Colbert.
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated after it was announced Colbert would replace Letterman.
I can’t wait. I know Colbert will surprise us all doing both the expected and unexpected.
He’s a big fan of Rocky and Bullwinkle (smart comedy).
I wonder if he’ll bring Sweetness with him.
His pistachio commercials are hilarious.
Gotta hand it to Jon Stewart. He’s launched a hell of a lot of great talent.
I believe Jessica Williams should be given a chance!
News flash: Rush Limbaugh’s head explodes. “Colbert’s shtick is to make Republicans look like idiots… to make us look like a bunch of Looney Tunes…”
I can’t think of anything to add to that.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/10/1291091/-Limbaugh-slams-Colbert-CBS-has-just-declared-war-on-the-Heartland-of-America
a little late for an april fools
and what the hell would rush limbaugh know about the “heartland of america”
He allegedly ate a poor black child’s still beating heart, pete. Does that count?
Stephen Colbert On David Letterman’s Retirement: ‘I Do Not Envy Whoever They Try To Put In That Chair!’
I’m going to miss that persona, truly. Everything ends sometime… Maybe he will reprise from time to time.
Here’s a link to one of my favorite Colbert Report segments: The Word–Original Spin. It’s about Justice Scalia–the Constitutional originalist. (It’s from September 2010)
http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/kup6co/the-word—original-spin
ROFLMAO!
Thanks, Elaine. I had missed that one. “Shaved walrus”. 😀 A classic.
Gene: He does that a lot, its always funny. [real title, comedy title]. He has called McConnell “Senate Minority Leader and Turtle-American”.