The Colbert Report
Airing Mondays through Thursdays at 11:30 pm on Comedy Central
"Open wide, baby bird, 'cause Mama's got a big, fat night crawler of truth!" Thus did Stephen Colbert pitch himself at the opening of the debut episode of his spin-off of "The Daily Show," his voice combining a taunt, a boast, and the cry of a loon. The loon thinks he's an American eagle, which is the very premise of "The Colbert Report", which is pronounced cole-BARE ra-PORE. "It's French-bitch," as the man tells the camera, giving that pause an extra fraction of a beat that somehow makes the gag go over every time.
As even my mother knows, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" is a top-notch fake news program with a comic sensibility encompassing goofball parody and wry satire, mild butthead raunch and deadpan Dada oddity. Colbert has worked a handful of personae in his "Daily Show" segments, among them the cocky doofus whom "The Colbert Report" inflates into a vapid and egomaniacal blowhard. He's a know-it-all know-nothing-a silly caricature of pop-jingoist, mock-populist pundits of the Bill O'Reilly type. "You're not the elite," Colbert told his viewers in that first episode. "You're not the country club crowd. I know for a fact that my country club would never let you in." He uses the word "balls" as often as possible and pronounces it with lust, making that S tingle while leveling a superior gaze. For instance, last Wednesday, after Fareed Zakaria defined himself as a centrist, Colbert countered, "Isn't a centrist just someone who doesn't have the balls to be a fanatic?"
Yes, I said Fareed Zakaria, the journalist and talking head. No, I'm not sure what was in it for him. The other guests last week were "Dateline NBC" host Stone Phillips, "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl, and CNBC jabber-mouth Jim Cramer. Each night, after dispensing with other absurdities, Colbert introduced his guest and, sucking up the subsequent applause as if it were of course for him, bounded triumphantly from his C-for-Colbert-shaped anchor desk to an adjacent set. He there continued his shtick; the guest played straight man.
Once in a while, there popped these weird moments when Colbert would drop the character for the length of one sincere question about, say, the CIA leak investigation. He prodded Stahl, "Compare this period of time? to when Watergate was just breaking." Huh? Why? One fears that, deep down, this dexterous wit wants to be Charlie Rose.
Whenever I start to wonder what such blips of seeming seriousness might mean in the context of Colbert's project of teasing the news media, I get bored, so I'll just float the idea that the host already knows his show is at risk of growing thin and airless fast. Even Bill O'Reilly knows that Bill O'Reilly is already a caricature, and even a fan of Colbert's preening idiot routine can start feeling claustrophobic after a whole 22 minutes of it. I'd be delighted to see you pull it together, Colbert. Have you got the balls?