Atrios is mad at Ana Marie Cox for her column about the Colbert performance at the White House Correspondents Association dinner. Well, Atrios is always mad at someone, isn’t he? He seems to share with George W. Bush the sincere and passionate belief that anyone who disagrees with him must be A Bad Person. (And would someone please send him a dictionary so he can look up the term “wanker”?)
Atrios links to Digby at Hullabaloo, who provides a detailed fisking of Cox’s column. Digby’s point seems to be that Cox is acting like an insider journalist, thus betraying her Web roots. Or something. (“Our little Wonkette is all grown up.” Do I hear the voice of condescending envy, with just a touch of misogyny? Update: If I heard misogyny, it must have been with my tin ear. My apologies to Digby. More here.)Now as it happens I loved Colbert’s performance. I thought, and think, that it was the best precis ever offered of what’s wrong with the Bush Maladministration. I wish that it had gotten wider attention from the mainstream press, and I think it didn’t get that attention largely because the mainstream press was the other primary target of Colbert’s satiric wrath.
But nothing in Cox’s trenchant, sensible, and well-written column is inconsistent with those beliefs. The main points of the column, as I read it, are:
1. Bloggers are insisting that the press’s failure to laugh at Colbert’s routine was due entirely to the press’s complicity with the Bush Administration. An alternative view is that they didn’t laugh because it wasn’t funny.
2. Running a poll to determine whether something is funny reflects a misunderstanding of the concept “funny.”
3. Insisting that other people laugh at the jokes you enjoy, or suggesting that their failure to do is morally culpable, reflects either a bullying temperament or a misunderstanding of the concept “joke.”
4. Political humor is a poor substitute for political action.
Comedy can have a political point but it is not political action, and what Colbert said on the stage of the Washington Hilton — funny or not — means far less than what the ardent posters at ThankYouStephenColbert.org would like it to. While it may have shocked the President to hear someone talk so openly about his misdeeds in the setting of the correspondents dinner — joking about “the most powerful photo-ops in the world” and NSA wiretaps — I somehow doubt that Bush has never heard these criticisms before. To laud Colbert for saying them seems to me, a card-carrying lefty, to be settling. Colbert’s defenders might aim for the same stinging criticisms to be issued not from the Hilton ballroom but from the dais in a Senate Judiciary committee hearing. And I wouldn’t really care if they were funny or not.
As I said to a friend the next day, Colbert’s routine was deeply comic but mostly not funny. (The “glacier” line and the “greeting” to Scalia were the major exceptions.) After all, being ruled by this collection of clowns and criminals is, as we say, no joke.
Ridicule, and especially ironic ridicule, has a long and respectable history. But its purpose is not to cause laughter. No one, I think, denies that Swift’s “Modest Proposal” is among the masterpieces of the comic art. But it would take a heart of stone to laugh at it. The coroner’s jury that (according to Chesterton) found in the case of a starvation victim from the Irish Potato Famine that the cause of death was “Wilful murder by Lord John Russell” was making an excellent joke, but it wasn’t a joke intended to start uncontrollable giggling.
That’s the tradition I take Colbert to have been working in. It’s hard to tell without the perspective only time can afford, but I think his routine enriched that tradition.
Had I written Cox’s column, I would have said some of that, in order to defend Colbert from the silly charge of having “bombed” when a routine not primarily designed to cause people to laugh did not, in fact, cause them to laugh. And I wouldn’t have claimed, as she did, that the press did in fact cover Colbert’s routine in a way that give readers and viewers a sense of what it was about, or implied that only a ha-ha-funny stand-up act would have been an appropriate way to fill the role Colbert had agreed to fill.
But Cox’s primary target wasn’t Colbert. Her target was the self-importance of some of us on the left side of the Blogosphere. Her column reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s satiric attack on those who confused folk-singing with political activism.
Remember the war against Franco.That’s the kind where each of us belongs.
He may have won all the battles,
But we had all the good songs!
A good audience response to a satiric attack on a person or an idea is certainly a sign that the audience dislikes, or is prepared to dislike, that person or idea. But a sign isn’t the same thing as a cause. As Macaulay says of Thomas Wharton’s claim that in writing “Lilliburlero” he had “sung a king out of three kingdoms,”
… the song was the effect, and not the cause of that excited state of public feeling which produced the revolution.
Yes, politics is partly conducted through talking and writing, and those of us whose primary mode of political engagement is talking and writing can sometimes do useful work. Obviously the mass media matter in politcs, and those of us who engage in media criticism can sometimes help shape media behavior, which has real-world political consequences. But politics is mostly conducted by asking people for their votes, and by organizing to do so. Cox is reminding us that writers and talkers, and in particular comic writers such as Colbert and Cox herself and those who find their work amusing, shouldn’t take themselves too seriously.
Update Incorrect “iceberg” changed to correct “glacier” per a commenter’s suggestion. Several commenters think the above is unfair to Atrios. I’m not cricizing him for being angry; Lord knows, I hate BushCo about as much as one can on an outpatient basis. I’m criticizing him, and Digby, for attacking Cox personally for her failure to join the chorus on this one occasion, despite Cox’s well-established Blue credentials. As to “wanker,” of course Atrios knows its original meaning, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed its obvious inappropriateness as applied to a female.
Second update Atrios, responding to my suggestion that he tends to personally denigrate people who disagree with him rather than responding to their ideas, helpfully suggests that my criticism of his post results from my illiteracy. I’d like to thank him for providing evidence for my point.
In response to comments, I’ve changed “male chauvinism” to “misogyny.”
I’ve edited the comments, not to remove criticisms of me or the post but in accord with our published “play nice” rules of engagement. If you feel the urge to read reams of obscene abuse directed my way, let me refer you to the comments on the second Atrios post. Most of the obscene abuse directed at Ana Marie Cox is in the comments to the original post.
Jim Treacher: are y’all running a course on sad envy? Colbert generated so much public demand that CSPAN had to let google video offer it. (see http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/05/update_on_colbert_vi.html) and his TV viewership is up dramatically. That’s called a HIT. Colbert’s act was a HIT with the wide audience, no matter what the humiliated press corp has to say.
“Jim Treacher: are y’all running a course on sad envy?”
I’m not even sure what that means, so I’ll say no.
“Colbert generated so much public demand that CSPAN had to let google video offer it. (see http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/05/update_on_colbert_vi.html) and his TV viewership is up dramatically. That’s called a HIT. Colbert’s act was a HIT with the wide audience, no matter what the humiliated press corp has to say.”
That’s great. Unfortunately, none of those people were within earshot that night.
I mean, if your point is “It doesn’t matter that he bombed,” or “Bombing was his whole point,” okay, you’ve got a leg to stand on. But to just flat-out deny that he bombed? All that means is you don’t know the definition of the word.
Or, wait. Maybe…
BUSH LIED, COLBERT’S RIGHTFULLY EARNED LAUGHTER WAS NULLIFIED!!!
Well, the AH dictionary sez it “bomb” can have the slang meaning of “dismal failure or complete fiasco” – that’s a good description of the Bush presidency (unless Bush really is being paid by the Iranian Secret Service) but Colbert’s act was a triumph. The straight man is nor required to laugh after he slips and falls.
You may think of the Washington press and pols as the arbiters and audience, the rest of us just laugh.
The press corps weren’t Colbert’s audience, they were his props.
“Well, the AH dictionary sez it ‘bomb’ can have the slang meaning of ‘dismal failure or complete fiasco’ – that’s a good description of the Bush presidency (unless Bush really is being paid by the Iranian Secret Service) but Colbert’s act was a triumph.”
Ah, Triumph! He would have been funny.
“BUSH LIED, COLBERT’S RIGHTFULLY EARNED LAUGHTER WAS NULLIFIED!!!”
Hah! Now finally some humor out of all this. Nice one Jim.
I know what “wanker” means. But just to prove that Atrios and I both do, here is what dictionary.com has to say about this word:
1. A person who masturbates.
2. A detestable person.
I dare say that Ana Marie Cox is both of these. Exactly what about Atrios’ usage of the term do you find to be incorrect?
Poster Toaster: *laugh*. Sure, if the capitalization was a typo, then I’d withdraw my quibble. AMC certainly does have well-established ‘blue’ credentials.
This is mostly not a bad explication, EXCEPT THAT …
…OF COURSE Great Satire is not all hoots and giggles, overflowing with actual laugh-out-loud hilarity. The discomfort that comes from skewering a sacred cow or two, from political purpose, tends to step on the yuks.
But that DOESN’T mean Stephen Colbert wasn’t actually funny. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Satire isn’t a license for the audience to deny the humor at hand, but the compulsion to do so on the part of the Serious Person knows no political loyalty.
The Sense of Propriety of Serious Liberals is just as prickly and offended by, actual, functioning jokes, as is the nominal target. And that’s always been a problem, and it always will be.
You can’t tell someone something was funny — even though it was. The Serious Person will deny this, even as they’re put into their own grave.
LAck of actual laughs doesn’t make someone “not funny.” Which is a point continually overlooked. Stephen Colbert was funny — and daring. The jokes made people laugh — and smile. By turns hilarious and pointedly topical, actual laughs depend not only on political position, but on High Seriousness and the balance of humor and bloody reality contained in any one joke. To deny they were funny is to Cling to Denial more tightly than ever, like a life preserver on the Hindenberg.
I actually read someone complain that that joke was a mixed metaphor. “It’s not even a good metaphor.”
And Denial is the point. Stephen Colbert insists on having people — both Bush and the Press — listen to themselves. For many, the Social Niceties of the day are far more important than the blood spilling under the door from any one of dozens of the Issues of the Day.
One mustn’t Cause a Scene. And so denying that Colbert was funny is a proxy for the impossible, for denying the import and truth of his pointed, inescapable and substantive barbs. It won’t work, because it can’t work.
Colbert was funny and he was deadly serious all at the same time, subversively so — and that can’t be appropriated, owned, or laughed off. Which is the problem. Those who take themselves seriously will never be able to actually take seriously the bloody seriousness of the issues they actively sweep under the rug. Mustn’t cause a scene, you know. Must laugh at Bush’s video as he looks under the couch for those missing WMDs! Now that’s funny.
Ana Marie Cox’s column was plainly very poorly thought out. There’s nothing sadder than a socialite who presumes a sense of humor shown up by a Great Satirist in a social setting. Cox was shown up. That coulda, shoulda been Cox up there, laying into her Fellow Travelers: but even with an endless supply of priceless fodder, Colbert got there first.
And took down the house. The Nation was laughing — and that’s the problem for many. The American People came to that party and got their say in — and then laughed their asses off as Colbert gave the assembled deniers and dissemblers a taste of their own medicine. He owned that microphone.
The dinner guests were so spoiled and precious that what they objected to was that the American public was invited to the tea party and that, this time, the jokes were actually funny.
It didn’t hurt the humor-meter that the joke was on them. That was half the fun.
Kathy;
NO, they didn’t prevail over Franco. Franco died, and he misjudged his appointed successor, the current king of Spain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco#Spain_after_Franco
There seems to be a general misunderstanding that people will “have what’s coming for them” in the end. No, it isn’t like that.
The only way is if we do something and give them what’s coming for them.
I think Colbert wasn’t “funny” so much as “meta-funny,” i.e. funny on a higher level.
For example, him telling the press that their job was to be scribes for White House talking points wasn’t particularly funny.
The press, having been extremely offended by that joke, left the dinner, went back to work, and dutifully wrote out the WH talking points.
Now that’s funny.
The liberal media is attacking Colbert by saying he’s unfunny because they are offended by his conservative views:
http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2006/05/liberal-media-attacks-stephen-colbert.html