If It's Funny It's Funny (Unless It's Not)

Okay, the last thing anybody needs is me writing some more about Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. This has been talked to death, and if we needed more, Dan Froomkin had a very nice wrap up of the coverage in yesterday's Washington Post. His summation before he gets to the quotes and links is about the best I've seen:

It's worth looking at where Colbert was coming from. His show, of course, is a spin-off from Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Comedy Central. Both Colbert and Stewart have risen to superstar status largely by calling (how can I put it here?) baloney on the Bush administration -- and on the press corps that transmits said baloney without the appropriate skepticism or irony.

Their very subversive message, at its core: That this Bush guy is basically a joke. And that the mainstream press is a joke, because it takes Bush at his word.

It's true that Colbert and Stewart have a lot of fans within the press corps who appreciate and maybe even envy their freedom to call it like they see it.

But I think that message was just too much for the self-satisfied upper crust of the media elite to handle when Colbert threw it right in their faces on Saturday night.

Here they were, holding a swanky party for themselves, and Colbert was essentially telling them that they've completely screwed up their number one job these past six years. Is it any surprise they were defensive?

He notes, as anybody keeping track of the coverage would know, that the mainstream media first ignored Colbert and then decided, well, he hadn't really been very funny, anyway. My favorite in the "he wasn't funny" sweepstakes was the first piece I saw on it, Howie Kurtz's Tuesday column. He notes that liberals seemed to find the routine funny and conservatives didn't--except for liberal Noam Scheiber, a self-identified Colbert fan who didn't find it funny, making him the only honest man in town, apparently--so whether it's funny or not all boils down to your political position. That, of course, is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Even if it were possible, it falls apart as soon as we realize the liberal media wasn't laughing. (Of course, now that I think about it, there could be a whole other explanation for that disconnect.)

While I can understand that one's political position might leave one more or less inclined to laugh at Colbert's routine, I've always thought that stand-up comics live by a sort of variation on the FOX News slogan: "We tell jokes. You decide." You'll either find something funny or not. We can't get consensus as to the objective humor of Colbert's monologue. All we can do is watch it. Some of us will laugh, and some of us won't. There's not much more to it than that.