<p>Seeing “Ann Coulter” and “funny” closely juxtaposed is one of the more unbelievable things I’ve read, even on the Internet. I watch Ann Coulter and I want to get a tranquilizer dart gun.</p>
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<p>I’m a Bush supporter and I think that Colbert is hilarious. Maybe I’m alone.</p>
<p>I used to think that Jon Stewart was much funnier than Stephen Colbert. When the Colbert Report first aired, I dismissed it as overly derivative and unoriginal, but now I think it’s (arguably) more amusing than the Daily Show. </p>
<p>And A.S.A.P., I also agree with you, especially your final comment:
“Satire is not meant to be a feel-good, funny ha ha experience for its subjects. It makes no sense to invite a satirist with Colbert’s style and politcal slant and then be incensed when he does his job.”</p>
<p>In the interest of historical accuracy, I feel I need to point out that Bush was elected just once.</p>
<p>This fact haunts me when I think of the next presidential election and wonder if there isn’t someone in the constitutional law cubicle in the West Wing researching options for the current team.</p>
<p>I think the butt of the intended satire handled himself pretty well, shaking Colbert’s hand and saying “good job.” (Colbert was even crass enough to make fun of this gesture in a subsequent interview.) I don’t think you could really call the president “incensed.” He handled the situation with class. I’m not incensed, either, just bemused.</p>
<p>My comment had nothing to do with satire in general, but instead with what is appropriate in the context of an event that brings two sides together in what should be a limited fire zone. If there are no limits, the event will cease to be held, which would be too bad (hence my Ann Coulter reference, which seems to have carommed off of some). Perhaps Colbert really is the closest thing to Oscar Wilde that the current generation of Democrats can muster, but that’s a sad thing to contemplate.</p>
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I think it’s just how they manage to get such prominent guests. The publishers expect authors to do some rounds on the talk shows to push their books – and whatever the political slant, the fact is that it does sell books. If it’s not a book being promoted, it’s a movie. Comedy Central is not a big bucks operation – these people are coming on for their 8 minute interviews because that’s what their publicist wants – and obviously an appearance on the Daily Show is effective for getting books with a political slant promoted before a receptive audience. I’m sure that the publishers have learned from their sales figures that is is a profitable arrangement. </p>
<p>I do get the sense that Stewart actually does read the books, though – he can ask very incisive questions. He has quite a talent for getting right to the heart of a matter.</p>
<p>Driver, I would like to see any pundit of the Repubican persuasion go head to head with a Colbert or a Stewart or a Maher. Can you see Ann Coulter trying to banter with the big boys and keep up with that level of satire and humor? LOL!</p>
<p>Then again, it is a well documented fact that the truly satiristic and sarcastic have better developed frontal lobes!</p>
<p>I just like the fact that Jon Stewart is not about only having on “stars” that are opening movies…the folks whose books he features are interesting and I appreciate him giving their books the light of day. I have long appreciated Imus for his book plugs…he claims to be able to get any book on the NYT bestseller list if he recommends it… </p>
<p>I truly appreciate a bit of substance…with the humor… watching these interviews is almost like the reader’s digest version? </p>
<p>Thanks Allmusic, I was not “aware” of the documented frontal lobe differences… guess I am not surprised…</p>
<p>It seems that WaPo columnist Richard Cohen reads CC posts…
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<p><a href=“http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/05/colbert_wasnt_funny.html[/url]”>http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/05/colbert_wasnt_funny.html</a></p>
<p>Bush may not be a bully himself ( he has other complexes in my opinion) but he has surrounded himself with a gang of them,especially Dick Cheney. They do the dirty work for him so that he can play the nice guy.</p>
<p>So…satire is humour without timing? I dunno. Maybe I missed something. I would have loved to see those blows landing like Doonesbury zingers…but…they didn’t.</p>
<p>Discomfort is the perfect description.</p>
<p>Oh well. Opportunity lost. What a surprise.</p>
<p>For another perspective about the media being selective about what constitutes humor and good taste.</p>
<p>*For days the battle has raged on the Web: Did Stephen Colbert go too far in lampooning President Bush, to his face, at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night? Is that why his barbs did not generate more laughter around the room of 2700 journalists, celebrities and other guests? Or was it because he suggested the press was spineless in failing to confront the president on Iraq? Or was Colbert just not that funny?</p>
<p>In any case, the event has inspired debate on hundreds of political and media blogs, the posting of the video on dozens of sites, and massive traffic to E&P, where the first in-depth account of Colbert’s performance was posted Saturday night.</p>
<p>You’d think from all the criiticism that the guy had based his routine on joking about launching a war and not finding the WMDs that inspired it. Oh, right, that was President Bush, two years ago.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, appearing on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC program Monday night, joined the ranks of those who attended the dinner who felt Colbert “was not funny.” On the other hand, he said the president’s routine that night with a Bush impersonator was a howl.</p>
<p>This is the same Milbank who last June mocked a congressional forum on the Downing Street memo, and said it was led by a “hearty band of playmates.”</p>
<p>Certainly, deciding what’s funny is subjective, sometimes a matter of taste (or tastelessness), but increasingly, also, partisan. We bring our politics to everything nowadays, although some may be more open to good satire than others, even when someone on “your side” is hit.</p>
<p>Still, with the knocks on Colbert increasing, I have to ask: Where was the outrage when President Bush made fun of not finding those pesky WMDs at a very similar media dinner – in the same ballroom – two years ago? It represents a shameful episode for the American media, and presidency, yet is rarely mentioned today.</p>
<p>It occurred on March 24, 2004. The setting: The 60th annual black-tie dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association (with many print journalists there as guests) at the Washington Hilton. On the menu: surf and turf. Attendance: 1,500. The main speaker: President George W. Bush, one year into the Iraq war, with 500 Americans already dead.</p>
<p>President Bush, as usual at such gatherings of journalists, poked fun at himself. Audiences love to laugh along with, rather than at, a president, for a change. It shows they are good sports, which many people (including the president) often doubt. It’s all in good fun, except when it’s in bad fun, such as on that night in March 2004.</p>
<p>That night, in the middle of his stand-up routine before the (perhaps tipsy) journos, Bush showed on a screen behind him some candid on-the-job photos of himself. One featured him gazing out a window, as Bush narrated, smiling: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”</p>
<p>According to the transcript this was greeted with “laughter and applause” from the audience.</p>
<p>A few seconds later, he was shown looking under papers, behind drapes, and even under his desk, with this narration: “Nope, no weapons over there” (met with more “laughter and applause”), and then “Maybe under here?” (just “laughter” this time). Still searching, he settled for finding a photo revealing the Skull and Bones secret signal.</p>
<p>There is no record of whether Dana Milbank attended that dinner, but his paper the following day seemed to find this something of a howl. Jennifer Frey’s report, carried on the front page of the Style section (under the headline, “George Bush, Entertainer in Chief”), led with Donald Trump’s appearance, and mentioned without comment Bush’s “recurring joke” of searching for the WMDs.</p>
<p>The Associated Press review was equally jovial: “President Bush poked fun at his staff, his Democratic challenger and himself Wednesday night at a black-tie dinner where he hobnobbed with the news media.” In fact, it is hard to find any immediate account of the affair that raised questions over the president’s slide show. Many noted that the WMD jokes were met with general and loud laughter.</p>
<p>The reporters covering the gala were apparently as swept away with laughter as the guests. One of the few attendees to criticize the president’s gag, David Corn of The Nation, said he heard not a single complaint from his colleagues at the after-party. Corn wondered if they would have laughed if President Reagan, following the truck bombing of our Marines barracks in Beirut, which killed 241, had said at a similar dinner: “Guess we forgot to put in a stop light.”</p>
<p>The backlash only appeared a day or two later, and not, by and large, emerging from the media, but from Democrats and some Iraq veterans. Then it was mainly forgotten. I never understood why Sen. John Kerry did not air a tape of the episode every day during his hapless final drive for the White House.</p>
<p>In any case, another 1,900 Americans have died in Iraq since Bush’s ha-ha home video. As it happens, the Downing Street memo, and a similar British document that surfaced recently, suggested that Bush doubted WMDs existed and “fixed” the intelligence to take the nation to war. What a riot.</p>
<p>At that same Downing Street memo forum at the Capitol last year that Milbank mocked, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, after cataloguing the bogus Bush case for WMDs and the Iraqi threat, looked out at the cameras and notepads, mentioned the March 24, 2004 dinner, and acted out the president looking under papers and table for those missing WMDs. “And the media was all yucking it up … hahaha,” McGovern said. “You all laughed with him, folks.” Then he mentioned soldiers who had died “after that big joke.”</p>
<p>Dana Milbank, who seems to like a good laugh, did not mention this in his hit piece the following day. *</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/35804/[/url]”>http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/35804/</a></p>
<p>Wow, Richard Cohen wrote that? I’m surprised and impressed. It’s too bad I can’t say the same about those who not only defend Colbert but praise him.</p>
<p>I like Colbert, he is smart and funny…and his audience, whom seem to be a bit slow on the uptake, and have been for several years now, do they not remember laughing with Bush in his search for WMD?</p>
<p>If they would bother to ask some tough questions themselves, maybe they would get the jokes</p>
<p>optimisticdad, Greg Mitchell is right. </p>
<p>It’s ok. Bush’s support is just backwash. :)</p>
<p>I agree: he was skewering the press corps… and they deserve it. </p>
<p>Also agree that it was not funny. It was too real. But it was better than more Emperor’s New Clothes.</p>
<p>it was real, and that is what bothers so many…</p>
<p>This is an excerpt from a blog called billmon and I think it touches on some of the key points made already about the tradition of decorum at this dinner, Bush’s WMD humor and the general climate of politics today. </p>
<p>"The light entertainment at these events is also supposed to reflect the same spirit of forced good cheer, to the point where even matters of deadly seriousness – things that in other countries might cause governments to fall – are treated like inside jokes, as with Shrub’s looking-for-the-missing-WMDs-under-the-couch routine. Ha ha ha. We’re all friends here!</p>
<p>The underlying message, never stated or even acknowledged, is that there are no disputes that can’t be resolved within the cozy confines of our “democratic” (oligarchic) system. Friends don’t send friends to jail – or smash their presses or abolish their political parties or line them up against the wall and shoot them.</p>
<p>The problem is that the tissue of this particular lie has been eroding ever since the Clinton impeachment, if not before, and is now worn exceedingly thin. It’s becoming harder and harder to conceal the ruthlessness of the struggle for power, or ignore the consequences of losing it.</p>
<p>There were people at last night’s dinner who really could end up in jail – depending on Patrick Fitzgerald’s theory of the case and/or the results of the next two elections. Things have been done over the past five years that can’t be undone; crimes committed that can’t be uncommitted. If Colbert faced a tough crowd last night, it was probably because so many of them understand that the Cheneyites and the Rovians really are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenberg, and that if the airship goes down in flames their own window seats are going to get pretty toasty. Jobs are at stake. Careers could be at stake. For all we know lives could be at stake."</p>
<p><a href=“http://billmon.org/[/url]”>http://billmon.org/</a></p>
<p>Mootmom:
"If I were 20 years younger, I would want to have Colbert’s babies. " HILARIOUS.</p>
<p>SBMom:
“If they would bother to ask some tough questions themselves, maybe they would get the jokes.” SO TRUE.</p>
<p>Lots of people don’t get Colbert. I think he has true wit. If it hurts Bush’s feelings, well, too bad. There’s plenty of folks hurting worse.</p>
<p>Attacking Bush personally for his alcoholism, his drug use, or his wife would be rude and classless. Attacking the failed policies that will be with us for the next 20+years, as well as a press that appears to serve the White House rather than the American people is not. And if seems rude to some, I question their priorities. Rome is burning and people are worried about decorum?
Most of the country is pretty fed up with Bush and his cabal. It’s about time that he, and the press that has served him so well, hears what is really being said about town. It sometimes seems as if Bushis totally unaware of how much of the country sees his administration.</p>
<p>Well, if he didn’t know before, he certainly does now!</p>