Richard Cohen: A Scientific Inquiry

[BurtWorm]

Perhaps this should be posted in the Science forum...

Ken Silverstein of Harper's blog conducted this study to determine if Richard Cohen was funny enough or courageous enough to criticize Stephen Colbert's performance at the WHCAD:

http://harpers.org/sb-cohen-10384017304.html

Richard Cohen: a Scientific Inquiry
Is he funny? Is he courageous?
Posted on Monday, May 15, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
Sources

“Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask,” Richard Cohen wrote recently in the Washington Post regarding Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. And why, Ken, I hear readers asking now, are you wasting my time with Richard Cohen? Because after rereading that May 4 column, and a second one by Cohen five days later, it’s simply impossible to resist responding.

Cohen’s original column attacked Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner for being, as the headline put it, “So Not Funny.” Colbert, wrote Cohen, was “not just a failure as a comedian but rude,” as well as someone “representative of what too often passes for political courage.” In the second column Cohen complained that, in response to his musings on Colbert, he’d been savaged by “a digital lynch mob.” Cohen—who described himself as “a funny guy” in listing his credentials to critique Colbert—said his critics were politically motivated and had falsely accused him of being Bush’s lapdog (“If this is the case,” he wrote, “Bush had better check his lap”) and a “mainstream media warmonger.”

With some dust having settled over the Cohen-Colbert debate, I turn to the topic now not to attack but in the spirit of inquiry. Hence, to determine whether Cohen is qualified to judge Colbert’s performance, I pose two simple questions:

A) Is Richard Cohen funny?
B) Is Richard Cohen courageous?

....

[NNadir]

1. Unlike Richard Cohen, and like Colbert, this is both funny and true.