“Is it OK to laugh at someone’s pain? You’ll chuckle at the answer,” Stephen Colbert, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” said. The quote perfectly sums up the show, which finds Colbert acting as a political pundit who knows one thing: He is right, and everyone else is wrong.
He spends most of the time on “The Colbert Report” making his guests squirm with awkwardness and nervously answer questions as he sarcastically insults and berates their intelligence; twisting their words around to make them sound worse than they are. All this adds up to the most hilarious half hour on television.
The folks at Comedy Central and at “The Colbert Report” are obviously lampooning such biased political pundits as Bill O’Reilly and Andy Rooney as he attacks people’s opinions and views when they don’t mesh with his and points out that they are wrong simply because he is right. When Colbert asked a Colorado senator if he thought President Bush was a great president or the greatest president, the senator replied “neither,” and Colbert remarked, “I’ll put you down for great.”
This type of dry humor sets Colbert apart from the rest of the crowd by saying outlandish things and acting ridiculously silly without ever cracking a smile. At the beginning of one show, he shouts, “Tonight you’ll get authenticity, veracity and verarity. And someone’s been reading their thesaurus.” It’s the brand of humor only the intellectuals understand and leaves everyone else saying, “I don’t get it.” In a way, “The Colbert Report” lends itself as sort of a vehicle for smart comedy, which as of late, has been missing from Comedy Central. Shows such as the reality cartoon “Drawn Together” and the dull “Mind of Mencia” equate humor with disturbing, gross-out gags and racial jokes.
“The Colbert Report” places certain stories as the most important of the day, like a Latin salsa singer who falls offstage at a concert. Colbert played the clip numerous times to figure out what caused the fall. After judging that he tripped on his pant cuff, Colbert proceeds to list the uselessness of pant cuffs, like “a waste of expensive fabric,” and then places pant cuffs on his giant list of things that are “On Notice,” anything that is unfavorable in his eyes and should be monitored carefully so it doesn’t get out of hand. Among the items on the list were “Lutherans,” “Barbra Streisand” and “New York Intellectuals,” which he removed to make way for pant cuffs and placed on the “Dead to Me” list, where “CNN En Espanol” and “Candy Apples” rested.
He also interviewed a controversial journalist, Matt Taibbi, who followed John Kerry around in a gorilla costume during his 2004 presidential campaign and then interviewed a member of his staff in a Viking costume while on acid. Colbert asked, “You were once in a gorilla costume, and then you were in a Viking costume on acid. During that time, you said you were on drugs. How could you tell?” And when he walked over to the interview table and Taibbi remained seated, Colbert smirked, “Please don’t get up. No need for professional protocol here.” Colbert’s unashamed personality marks him as the funniest comedian because he tells it like he sees it and is unafraid to tell the truth, even if it makes his guests second guess why they ever agreed to be skewered on his show.
So, is it OK to laugh at someone’s pain? When Stephen Colbert is dealing the blows, it’s more than OK; it’s necessary.