Word: colbert
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Even in a campaign season where presidential candidates are turning up on late-night talk shows more often than stars of Judd Apatow comedies, The Colbert Report of April 17 was a perverse milestone...
Just a few days before the Pennsylvania primary, Colbert scored a hat trick: three Democratic candidates in one night. First came a "surprise" walk-on by Hillary Clinton, who showed up to help fix a technical snafu with the show's video feed. "I just love solving problems," she quipped. "Call me anytime. Call me at 3 a.m." Clinton's former rival John Edwards came next, joking about what he wanted from the two remaining Democratic candidates in return for his endorsement. (Help for the poor, and a pair of jet skis.) Finally, Barack Obama chimed in via satellite, doing...
Similarly, Jon Stewart rolls out a daily parade of video clips and responds to them, not with gag lines, but with an arched eyebrow, an expression of mock befuddlement, or mock-angry outburst dripping with sarcasm. Colbert's nightly impersonation of a pompous rightwing pundit, too, is one long wink to the audience - we're all hip to the put-on. David Letterman's Great Moments in Presidential Speeches - maybe the quintessential political satire of the Bush era - don't even need any reaction from the host; the absurdity is there...
Both of them, comedians and candidates, are thrown off their game in these encounters. Ironists like Stewart and Colbert have to do an awkward dance between sobriety and sarcasm when the real goods walk into the studio. Interviewing Obama just before the Pennsylvania primary, Stewart played it straight, before a closing zinger - demanding to know, on behalf of the American people, "Will you pull a bait and switch, sir, and enslave the white race?" Obama's ear-to-ear grin was maybe his least sincere moment of the campaign...
...Lavish indeed, and relentless - a hallucinatory workout for the eyes. On his show this Monday, Stephen Colbert described Speed Racer as "the classic story of boy meets seizure-inducing lights," and noted that, to get a sense of the picture's cinema style, you should "put 80 pounds of fireworks into an industrial dryer, crawl right in there with them, turn it on and then light the fuse. It'll give you a good idea of the visual onslaught you'll be enduring." As usual with Colbert, the humor highlighted a sneaky truth: in its assaultive creativity, its high-speed...