I love this. In an interview with the Onion's AV Club, Steven Colbert the person--as opposed to Steven Colbert, the "Colbert Report" character, proves that he's nobody's dancing poodle, not the Right's and not the Left's, and I'm going to make a prediction here: eventually that will make the liberal media crazy, and they'll turn on him. Fortunately, he's such a genius that it won't matter.
Witness, for example, Colbert-the-person's elegant refusal to jump on the bash-Bill-O'Reilly bandwagon, despite numerous attempts to bait him into doing so by AV Club interviewer Nathan Rabin. Instead, every time Rabin desperately tries to throw O'Reilly under the bus, Colbert-the-person compliments O'Reilly and says, very sincerely, that O'Reilly is just flat, all-out great. Rabin must have been sweating with the effort and in tears by the end of the interview. I'm amazed the Onion even ran it. Rock on, Steven!
By his own admission, Stephen Colbert specializes in playing "high-status idiots," a niche he refined as a venerable correspondent on The Daily Show and perfects as the host of The Colbert Report, a Daily Show spin-off that adroitly satirizes Bill O'Reilly's bullying media-age demagoguery...the A.V Club spoke with Colbert about Bill O'Reilly, fantasy role-playing games, and the plague of truthiness sweeping the nation.
AVC: What about Bill O'Reilly and similar figures makes them so ripe for satire?
SC: Status is always ripe for satire, status is always good for comedy. And they have the highest possible status—and that's what we've tried to amplify with everything on the show. Everything on the show has my name on it, every bit of the set. One of the things I said to the set designer—who has done everything, I mean even Meet The Press, he does that level of news design—was "One of your inspirations should be [DaVinci's painting] The Last Supper." All the architecture of that room points at Jesus' head, the entire room is a halo, and he doesn't have a halo." And I said, "On the set, I'd like the lines of the set to converge on my head." And so if you look at the design, it all does, it all points at my head. And even radial lines on the floor, and on my podium, and watermarks in the images behind me, and all the vertices, are right behind my head. So there's a sort of sun-god burst quality about the set around me. And I love that. That's status.
AVC: There's an innate appeal to demagogues, and your show plays on that. Is it fun to be playing a character who's so insanely narcissistic? Is there any element of it that's cathartic?
SC: It's hard. It is fun, because mostly it's getting laughs. The audience seems to be responding to it, so that's the fun part. But the character can be tough, because it's hard for me to maintain the level of self-assurance that someone like O'Reilly has all the time. He was so admirable in a way when he was on Letterman, because he really was kind of unflappable. He was bigger than any venue he's in. And that's a hard thing to achieve. I'd love to be able to believe that for short periods of time. I'm afraid if I did that completely well, I'd never be able to turn it off. How great would it be to feel that great about yourself?
AVC: It seems like it's much more an overt parody of O'Reilly.
SC: Right, sure, O'Reilly, Hannity, there's a little bit of Lou Dobbs, where he rides the same story over and over again, the attention to sartorial detail like Anderson Cooper, absolutely bullheaded holding onto an idea, no matter how shallowly considered, like Hannity, and almost a physical aggressiveness that O'Reilly has. O'Reilly's the easiest one to reference, because he's the most popular. He's the one everyone's gonna understand. And he also does it best. He's an incredibly aggressive performer. We try to include a little bit of all of them.
Got it, MSM? The smartest and best satirists, like Colbert, send everybody up, but even more important, they don't know the meaning of the phrase "sacred cow." And in this case, Bill O'Reilly's not the sacred cow--the reality of what happened in this interview is more complex and more important. The sacred cow here is the unspoken implication that in order to be taken seriously as a social commentator, you have to specifically bash O'Reilly. And Colbert just proved his toughness and his willingness to rebel against all liberal MSM dogma. That's why Colbert has staying power, and that's why he'll be on the outs with the NYT, eventually. It's also why he'll go down in history as a new HL Mencken.
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