Yes, Mr. Cohen, He Is - Democratic Underground

Pamela Troy

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Fri May-05-06 11:32 AM
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Yes, Mr. Cohen, He Is

I am a funny guy... even back in elementary school, I was sometimes asked by the teacher to "say something funny" … This, anyway, is my standing for stating that Stephen Colbert was not funny …. he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country…When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or -- if you're at work -- take away your office.
Richard Cohen, Washington Post 5/4/06

Yes, Mr. Cohen, Stephen Colbert is funny. I don’t doubt that you truly, honestly, didn’t find Colbert’s performance last Saturday entertaining. So I’m going to explain to you, as clearly as I can, why so many of us did.

First of all, I’m sorry, but you're not "a funny guy" in the sense that Colbert is a funny guy. Most truly funny people don't introduce themselves with the assertion "I'm a funny guy," just as most truly moral people aren't in the habit of declaring "I'm a moral person." And while I've no doubt you wowed your grammar school buddies with your bon mots, any class clown who's so unthreatening that he's called on by his teacher to "say something funny" is probably destined to grow up to be, not a satirist of the first water, but someone who writes either "heartwarming" situation comedies where everyone learns a lesson and hugs in the penultimate act, or mildly amusing syndicated newspaper columns.

What you don’t seem to understand is that it wasn’t just Colbert who was the entertainment that night. It was the “audience” who shared the stage with him before those C-Span cameras, and who have underlined Colbert’s points, first by trying to pretend to the rest of us that they were never made, then by assuring us that, really, we weren’t enjoying it because “he wasn’t funny.”

Oh, Mr. Cohen, trust me, for us proles out here in our living rooms, he was funny! What a pleasure it was for us to see those tense smiles in Colbert's audience, hear the uneasy titters or even astonished “wows” heard faintly from somewhere in that distant room filled with the rich and the powerful. And thanks to folks like you, the hilarity has continued. I used to consider that Marx Brothers’ perennial, Margaret Dumont, the greatest straight man in history, but this week that honor must go the Mainstream Media, who have done her pigeon-voiced, prow-bosomed Grande Dame one better by not breaking character and loosening their stays even after the cameras were turned off.

It’s not just that for the past few years we have watched George W. Bush responding almost entirely to carefully vetted audiences guaranteed to applaud enthusiastically and ask hard-hitting “questions” like “Thank you Mr. President, for your leadership in the war on terror.” It’s that we’ve also watched a press staring politely and blandly off into space, carefully not asking the obvious questions that we in the audience are practically screaming at our television screens and newspapers, cutting away to impart to us the breathtaking “news” that Michael Jackson is walking from his car to the courthouse, burying stories embarrassing to the Bush administration carefully on an inside page, a press that to all appearances is still serenely confident about its own competence even as the rest of us shake our heads and wonder if what we’re seeing is deliberate obtuseness or genuine stupidity.

And yes, Mr. Cohen, Stephen Colbert is courageous. Again, I don’t doubt that you are truly hugging tightly to yourself the conviction that he wasn’t. I’m going to explain to you – as politely as I can – why he what he has qualifies as courage.

What he has qualifies as courage because it has been so absent in our media. As New York Times reporter Elizabeth Bumiller opined in 2004 while explaining the media’s unwillingness to ask hard questions during the march to war:

“I think we were very deferential, because in the East Room press conference, it's live. It’s very intense. It's frightening to stand up there. I mean, think about it. You are standing up on prime time live television, asking the president of the United States a question when the country is about to go to war.”

What was she afraid of do you think? Did she think she would be tossed into prison for asking a tough question? No, of course not. She was afraid of losing access, of being cut out of the loop, of some editorial writer or talk show pundit calling her disloyal – of no longer being one of the cool kids invited to the important parties and panel shows. She was afraid. You were afraid. Just about every one of you charged with asking those hard questions, looking for the truth, weighing dispassionately and skeptically what we were hearing from the government, was afraid to do your job, either because you didn’t want to go against the Beltway consensus, or because you were so terrified by the events of 9/11 that you threw away your responsibilities and hid under the covers.

Yes, yes, I know. Things have gotten a bit better since then. Now that the rotten truth of what is happening in Iraq, in Washington, in New Orleans, in our country has begun to reek to the point of being unmistakable, the press has begun to show signs of uneasiness, occasionally tossing a hard question at the president and his associates. But as a member of that press cowed by the president back when his poll numbers were high, you have no business denigrating Colbert’s performance because it took place at a time when Bush’s poll numbers are tanking. No doubt it would have been more spectacular back in 2003, but Colbert wasn’t “a big name” back then, was he?

You were.

What were you writing? What kind of questions were you asking?