Press Correspondent's Feast Of Fools

Guy Yedwab Writing The Essay 4/8/2007 Press Correspondent's Feast of Fools (Ex 5) Many people have said that many things have changed since 9/11. The lackadaisical, warm, peaceful, profitable, and all-in-all enjoyable 1990s ground to a sudden and stomach-dropping halt. A whole new generation of young adults, the first born after the intensely political Cold War and the first to grow up in a far less political climate, was suddenly thrust back into the political world. An attack on American soil made it, at least briefly, of earth-shattering importance to follow world events. Unfortunately, the political and journalistic climate of the period was not the most welcoming for the new youth. As Dan Sneirson observes in Entertainment Weekly, “These are trying times. Beset by towering gas prices, never-ending wars, and perplexing celebrity-name fusions, we had nowhere to turn for guidance...until one man stepped forward and administered a wedgie to our troubles.” The man is Stephen Colbert, and the wedgie Sneirson describes is the viciously topical satire he provides each night, four nights a week. As James Poniewozik says in TIME Magazine, Colbert's format is a direct reaction to the media pundits through which many Americans now get their news: “...A hypocrite. A blowhard. Pompous, superficial and vain. He is 'poorly informed but highly opinionated.' [as Colbert puts it.]” The show, it seems, is trapped in the moment. It is filled to the brim with cultural references of today. As James Poniewozik observes, one of his comedic strains harkens back to the “2004 election, when the Bush campaign positioned itself against ivory-tower liberal élites.” In future years, will we remember what President Bush campaigned on? Probably not, no more than we can remember what President Eisenhower ran on, or President Taylor (did we even have a President Taylor?). On the other hand, his connection to his Eliot-style “tradition” is evident. Celia Wren, writing for the Catholic publication Commonweal, compares his satire to “the savage bite of Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest

Proposal.'” His satirical style of swaggering like the TV pundits he criticizes is reminiscent of the “Feast of Fools” which took place during the Middle Ages, where (as Dario Fo describes in his book The Tricks of the Trade) “the chosen minstrel presented himself in a caricature mask of the local bishop. Accompanied with great, if deliberately grotesque, pomp into the cathedral...the minstrel ascended the pulpit to deliver a tongue-in-cheek sermon, in which he mercilessly mimicked all the homilies and actions of the bishop during the preceding year.” Neva Chonin, in the San Francisco Chronicle, described his appearance at the Press Correspondent's Dinner (in the presence of President Bush, just as the chosen minstrel of the Feast of Fools would be in the presence of the bishop) thusly: “There was a time when it was a court jester's privilege to tell the emperor he had no clothes on and then to escape with his head. Colbert resurrected that tradition. He faced a hostile room and a hostile president and listened while his quips fell into silence....Find the video online. Watch it and weep, because only a jester can save us now.” On the one hand, the Correspondent's Dinner was entirely concerned with the modern day and current events: the jibes were aimed at today's Fox News and today's Bush Administration. Current scandals, rather than institutional structural failings, seemed to be the target of his jibes. But as Chonin points out, the real subject of the evening was the relationship between the press and the government; a bulwark of democracy, debated since long before the American Revolution. Chonin isolates the “privilege to tell the emperor he had no clothes on,” and it is precisely that element which runs through the entirety of Stephen Colbert's show, and his performances in the public. He is not afraid to tackle the hypocrisies in the media, in religious figures, in politics both at home and abroad—and even, sometimes, at himself.