Interpretation

Guy Yedwab Writing the Essay 4/10/2007 Interpretation ●

“Fact-Obsessed Bloggers” -- My initial, visceral reaction to The Daily Show's “Fact Obsessed Bloggers” sketch was that it was hilarious to see what lengths of absurdity Stephen Colbert would go to with a stone-serious face. Phrases which could in almost no context be considered normal were rattled off with the same icy gravitas with which we expect Ted Koppel to announce an attack on our nation, and the same righteous ire with which Bill O'Reilly treats Democrats on his show. The relationship between Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart in this sketch, however, comes to mirror the relationship between Stewart's style of The Daily Show and Colbert's eventual use of The Colbert Report: as Colbert says, “Jon may point out the hypocrisy happening in the news story... I illustrate the hypocrisy in the news story [in my character].” In this sketch, as Colbert goes through his increasingly absurd and hypocritical interpretation of the established media en masse, he provides a perfect foil to Stewart's genuine reactions to his work. As Anne Bogart would say, he uses the prompting of Jon Stewart's questions to “light a fire” under the stereotype of traditional media's reactions to new media— Colbert begins with statements that seem rational and conform to the stereotypical logic of traditional media, Jon asks a pointed question which forces Colbert to respond in a way that betrays the gaping flaws in that logic. Un-pushed, Colbert would seem like a rational media analyst—pushed by Jon, he manages to reveal more about the conventional wisdom than we originally knew.

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Truthiness – Originally, what I thought was amazing about this segment was the use of a very common stereotype (the journalist who ignores fact) to attack a cultural phenomenon (an erosion of the idea of absolute truth). Colbert identifies that journalists who don't believe in objective fact get to use their subjective facts to build a reality of their own. He revisits this

theme many times, most notably in another segment titled “Wikiality,” where he says that Web 2.0 has made reality so subjective that anyone can edit it (like a Wikipedia article). This segment, being the heart of the first episode, and being one of the most notorious of his sketches (the word “truthiness” was OED's Word of the Year in 2005), has always seemed to me important in the grand scheme of things—it established the central idea behind Stephen Colbert's character, and (through the stylistic format of The Word segment) linked it to the Bill O'Reilly segments (Memo) which it parodies. Colbert himself referred to it as “the thesis statement of the show,” and it reappears nearly verbatim partway into his speech at the Press Correspondents' Dinner. Again, Colbert seems to set a fire underneath a common stereotype (that certain journalists don't seem to care about facts as much as their passions) to come up with a more over-arching lesson. It is satirical not just toward a certain group of political people, but towards an entire philosophy of life. And unlike the Daily Show, he accomplishes this without the aid of the probing questions of Jon Stewart—instead, like Bill O'Reilly's talking points projected during his “Memo” segment, he uses ironic bullet points at the side of the screen, carefully worded to undercut and expand the meaning of what he is saying. I always imagined that those words are based on the commentary that hits Stephen Colbert whenever he watches those pundits he disagrees with—the analytical thoughts with which he lights a fire under the thoughts of the narrow-minded. ●

Press Correspondents' Dinner – If Truthiness is the thesis of Colbert's career, than the Press Correspondents' Dinner is one of the peaks. Stephen Colbert delivers an unabashadly wicked skewering of the Bush Administration and the established press in the presence of the President and addressed to the press itself. The message of the satire was clear, and it was clear that many were uncomfortable with the subject. But nobody could argue with what Colbert was saying— merely by expressing their disapproval that he said it at a forum that most thought should have been devoid of political debate. For Stephen Colbert, as he describes it, he came to do exactly what he does on his show. His assumption was that he had been summoned to do just that. It

wasn't until he saw the Internet reaction afterwards that he understood what I understood immediately—that the same satire, transplanted into a more audacious setting, had the more powerful effect precisely because it proved that he was committed to what he was saying, and precisely because of the broad audience which heard it which had not previously heard it before. In my mind, it instantly reminded me of a passage I had read from Commedia dell'Arte legend Dario Fo's book, Tricks of the Trade. Speaking of the power of satire, Dario Fo relates an annual Feast of Fools which took place through much of the Middle Ages. After a huge parade, the town's preeminent jester was brought to the church to meet the Bishop, who was required to give the jester his clothes. The jester proceeded into the church and, from the very pulpit of the Bishop himself, delivered a self-mocking imitation of the Bishop to the flock. The similarity between that satirical set-up and this was clear—Colbert had dressed up in the “clothes” of the Conservative Movement, and was delivering a scathing speech in “support” of their policies. In the Middle Ages, the Feast of Fools was banned by the Pope, but popular support forced him to reinstate it. In the Democracy we currently inhabit, luckily, that fear is far less.