Your Principles Or Your Obsequiousness: Which Would 'Stephen Colbert' Choose?

Stephen Colbert: He's both a suck-up and an arch-conservative on his show; which means more to him? Comedy Central

 

by Marc Hirsh

Elections are easy. Comedy is hard. Especially comedy that hinges more or less directly on the outcome of elections. Jon Stewart has repeatedly mentioned, both recently and in 2004, that he would much rather struggle to fill four half-hour shows every week than have current events provide The Daily Show with the easy material it's had for eight years. For her part, Tina Fey has said that she'd like to pack up her wickedly brilliant Sarah Palin impression after November 4.

Stephen Colbert, of course, has it a little bit easier. Where Stewart plays the role of the last sane man in a world gone mad, Colbert takes it in the other direction, mocking the lunatics by out-crazying them as much as possible. The fact that he's clearly playing an outsized character on The Colbert Report (unlike Stewart, whose on-air persona seems to be distilled, at least to some degree, from his actual attitude and political leanings) gives him the ability to ride out the election to whichever outcome and overreact accordingly.

If McCain wins, of course, then it's business as usual. But the prospect of an Obama victory raises a much more interesting dilemma: how will "Stephen Colbert" react?

On the surface, there doesn't seem to be any question about it. The Colbert character has spent the entire election cycle warning Americans that Obama is a secret Muslim who, if elected, will be sworn into office on a gay baby and invite all of his terrorist buddies to sleep on the White House couches. So Colbert is going to take that and run, right? He'll report to his viewers from a nightmare world existing entirely in his own imagination, a pundit ranting hysterically against the system?

Maybe. But here's what's interesting about Colbert's options in a post-Obama world: he could choose to go in exactly the opposite direction and still be entirely consistent with the character he's spent three years perfecting. That's because "Colbert," as longtime viewers know -- the character, that is, and not the performer -- is marked by a tendency to blindly accept whatever authority is placed in front of him. Much of his slavish praise of George W. Bush has come from a position that it's un-American to question the President. After all, that's what makes him the President, isn't it?

Not only that, "Colbert" is a follower, willing to jump on whatever bandwagon seems to have the most momentum and then shouting the loudest to make it seem like he was there first. This is someone whose official stance has been to believe in global warming ever since An Inconvenient Truth made money: "The market has spoken," as he's so fond of pointing out, and it's clear that that should be the last word on the matter. And it's important to remember that "Colbert" actively opposed McCain during the Republican primaries, hailing him as White House-worthy only after he clinched the nomination.

Would he do the same with a President Obama, embracing him just as enthusiastically as he has Bush, McCain and Palin, even as it would send him to the opposite ideological extreme of everything he's said up to now? It's not only possible, it may have already happened: last Wednesday, "Colbert" went ahead and endorsed Obama so as not to be left behind by all the other high-profile Republicans doing the same. Becoming a rah-rah Obamaphile post-election would be equally justified by the character, who'd be playing the same game, just switching teams.

So is "Stephen Colbert," at his core, an ideologue or a sycophant? Perhaps only Stephen Colbert, the one without the quotation marks, knows which one it'll be.

Marc Hirsh is a writer whose work can be seen in The Boston Globe and on MSNBC.com. He is a regular contributor to NPR's Song Of The Day.

8:33 AM ET | 11- 3-2008 | permalink

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