By Rob JackmanThe Daily Northwestern
Audiences across America love Stephen Colbert’s value-creating character. Supposedly, he exposes the irrationality of the right wing. This illogicality contrasts with whatever audience members believe, thereby confirming their own reasoning skills. But people who think this are sorely mistaken. Colbert’s attack is not on the American right – it’s on the American media. Colbert does exactly what they do, but without the fancy acknowledgement of objectivity and calm distance from what he is reporting on.
Don’t believe it? Still think Colbert’s a hero of the American “left”? Consider Colbert’s seldom-used but informative caricature of the liberal radio host. This character – whose geeky, Birkenstock counter-culture style is delightfully boring – makes the unacknowledged argument that the left, and particularly the left’s media representatives, suffer from precisely the same malady as the right. The leftist host’s classic line, “I think the sexiest people are gay, African-American paraplegics,” asserts a bizarre loyalty to political correctness.
Colbert seems to derive his values from Christianity. This could not be further from the reality. Christianity is just a necessary part of Colbert’s imitation of Bill O’Reilly. It’s a trumped-up faith adopted as a pretext for Colbert’s real source of values: himself. Colbert flaunts his superiority over faith in one particular episode, where he gives Jesus the “wag of the finger” for showing his face on a burrito. Colbert’s disdain of faith is a favorite trick, going back to the “This Week in God” segment on “The Daily Show.” The religion-taunting isn’t restricted to Christianity. By setting an empty place at his news desk for Joe Lieberman during the 2006 primary season, in the style of the Jewish tradition of setting an empty place for Elijah at Passover, Colbert shows his love for mocking all faiths.
As faith takes its lumps and irrationality is on constant display, it seems as though reason remains the only value-source that Colbert does not laugh at. “The Daily Show”-esqe written commentary on “The Word” segment is a case in point. Someone behind the scenes hijacks Colbert’s message without his knowledge. This version of O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” is on two separate tracks, with the audience’s allegiance clearly on the side of the bloviating lines to Colbert’s left. Reason is put on a pedestal. Whose reason? Clearly not the American media’s. The show centers on the demonstration that the American media does not operate with reason. Stephen Colbert humor will not be restricted to just mocking Bill O’Reilly.
Most interestingly, Colbert’s protagonist (himself) has no clear antagonist. His shots at the left are frequent and intentionally ill-founded, but his willingness to take on the right when it comes into contact with his character belies the fact that he has no predestined enemy. Colbert’s character needs to be on the right because of the right’s perceived strength. It is not to mock the right wing specifically. Colbert’s expos
