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By Tom Masland
Newsweek
Oct. 21, 2005 - Pentagon-speak may best frame the crucial questions facing late-night comedy’s upstart challenger. After all, "The Colbert Report"’s writers, like the Jon Stewart crowd that fathered them and precede the show on air, make a feast of the Bush administration’s vernacular. Does "The Colbert Report" enrich our world? For the moment. Can “Colbert” go the distance? Only time will tell. But it’s going to be a tough slog.
The odds are stacked against “Colbert.” Comedy Central’s satirical "Colbert Report" this week went up against established heavyweights in the field of pulling chuckles from the day’s mainly sad dramas. And while one note may sustain a samba, it’s going to be a challenge to string out this half hour of shtick into long-running theme music for our lives, in the manner of David and Jay.
Take Wednesday night’s riff on the big news event of the day: the opening session of Saddam Hussein’s murder trial in Baghdad. Colbert boils it down to "Tonight’s Word: Disappointed." “I don’t know who produced the trial,” the faux-newscaster says. Saddam “looks like he’s doing a dinner-theater production of 'Fiddler on the Roof',” he complains, proposing beard removal and a makeover. “This is the only character from the original war and the sequel that America still cares about,” he says. “If you do this trial right, you can remind us why we tuned in to begin with.”
Beyond the question of whether the gag works as comedy, there’s plenty to ponder here. Many a media think-tank report over the last decade has studied whether the encroachment of entertainment values into the conventional news media best serves democracy. This trend may have peaked when Fox News assigned the former Iran-contra string-puller and GOP senatorial candidate Oliver North to cover the Iraq war—a ratings triumph. The influential Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll, since retired, likened the appearance of such faux newscasters to Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds”—fiction cloaked in the cadences of real broadcasting, producing a horror story that panicked parts of the nation. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, who dispensed with American journalism’s traditional effort to balance opinion, invites parody—clearly he’s the main model for “Colbert.” Still, the fact that an entertainer out of Second City now can get over by mocking traditional broadcasting turns the trend on its head. All this at a time when Hollywood just has celebrated one of the true greats of the news business, who found his moment in World War II bombing of London: Edward R. Murrow, in the George Clooney film “Good Night, and Good Luck.”
The Saddam bit directly poses an important question: do some powerful decision makers actually see making policy as similar to scripting a TV drama? Let’s remember that when George W. Bush flew home from the Azores after his crucial prewar meeting with the leaders of Britain and Spain, he reportedly wanted to watch a film with a simple plot. Perhaps by accident, the whole post-September 11 drama for America has played out with the pacing of a TV series. Season one, following 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, ends with a spring cliffhanger—the disappearance of Osama bin Laden. Bush raises the stakes the following September as the series reopens with his dramatic appearance before a dubious United Nations General Assembly. Season two ends with the stage-managed toppling of Saddam’s statue the next spring in Baghdad. But now we’re into the fourth season, and the White House seems to have lost control of the script, making a fat target for the kibitzers on “Colbert” and its ilk.
Witness, too, how readily established figures in the news business lend credibility to Stewart and the upstart Stephen Colbert. O’Reilly himself appeared on Jon Stewart long enough to call the host a “pinhead”—he has a book to flog—and Colbert’s guests during his first week included Stone Phillips of “Dateline NBC,” Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes” and Fareed Zakaria, editor of NEWSWEEK International. They’re not stupid. Many Americans, especially young Americans, already were getting the top of the news from “The Daily Show,” Letterman, Leno and Conan O’Brien. “The Colbert Report” opened with promising ratings. It’s clearly here for the medium term. The main challenge will be to sustain it beyond the Bush years.
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