The report on Colbert: no smiles from scribes By Scott Collins Times Staff Writer
May 2, 2006/L.A. TIMES
The frenzied reaction to Stephen Colbert's performance at Saturday's White House correspondents' dinner in Washington has been more illuminating than anything the Comedy Central host said or did. A few notes:
• The trade magazine Editor & Publisher said Colbert's performance left President Bush and the first lady "unsmiling." Based on C-SPAN's coverage (which featured too few reaction shots), it was hard to tell if the president was annoyed or simply bored (after all, there was little Colbert said that hasn't been uttered before, sometimes in harsher terms).
Colbert's bit lasted about 25 minutes, including a pre-taped segment that he offered as an audition tape for the job of White House press secretary (the piece ended with correspondent Helen Thomas chasing Colbert through an underground parking garage). Colbert spent a good deal of time drubbing the Bush White House ("This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg"). His better lines, though, attacked less-obvious targets (he called former Ambassador Joseph Wilson "the most famous husband since Desi Arnaz"). But overall, the routine could've used some judicious editing; watch the performance again and you'll see that Colbert never really builds to any high point. It's just a hodgepodge of hit-or-miss gags. Midway through, I found my attention wandering too. And what was up with throwing in that apropos-of-nothing reference to Jesse Jackson?
• Liberals are attacking the New York Times and other outlets for ignoring or underplaying Colbert's monologue, and instead focusing on the president's gentler, self-deprecating interplay with a Bush impersonator. "It's insane journalism not to write about Colbert's appearance," playwright Christopher Durang wrote on Huffington Post. Seems to me a complete story would have given ample play to both. Colbert is clearly what everyone was talking about. Bush and his friend deserved coverage because, well, just about every public act the president commits is newsworthy, whether it's funny or not.
• The White House Correspondents' Assn. might want to rethink televising this thing. The crowd included many of the same people who've built Colbert up into the hottest thing to hit the Beltway since Karl Rove. Now he comes and pokes fun of them and most of them sat there in their finery looking stone-faced and glum. Did they find Colbert's routine as messy as I did? Maybe. But it seems a lot more likely that the D.C. journos are proving humor-impaired when anyone points out their performance in the run-up to the Iraq war. Hey, you invited Colbert. If you don't want to yuk it up, do a raffle.
On 5/2/06, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Here's the Stephen Colbert Daily Show Check-in from
> 5/1/06:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax4rotjrylo
>
> AND -- Colbert on 60 Mins:
>
> Total time : 14 min or so.
>
> Part 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69W70HQVawU
>
> Part 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCIDCsvEJIM
>
> Part 3 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAoBcY61Tt4
>
> -B.
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