Stephen Colbert is dealing with the fallout from a tweet sent out on his show’s behalf — and doing so on-air by imagining his show really getting cancelled.
Last week, the Twitter feed @ColbertReport, affiliated with the Comedy Central series, tweeted an out-of-context joke from a segment mocking the Washington Redskins’ owner and his attempts to reach out to the Native American community without changing his team’s offensive name. The #CancelColbert hashtag immediately caught fire, and Colbert opened his show by depicting the studio shutting down… his writers walking out dejected… Manhattan freezing over… the famous 1970s-ad Native American shedding a single tear… all manner of dystopia.
The actor B. D. Wong, himself Asian, appeared as a therapist of sorts to explain to Colbert, dressed in Redskins regalia and lying on a couch, that he was having a horrible dream. “This is still ‘The Colbert Report,’” Colbert announced.
It was, all in all, a pretty audacious gambit — to openly mock those who’d sought to get Colbert fired by rubbing in their face that it’d never happen, and to bring in one of America’s most prominent actors of Asian extraction to aid in a non-apology. In his opening monologue, following an audience chant (“Ste-phen! Ste-phen!”) Colbert joked about how offensive it was that his shoes were made in Vietnam (rather than in China) and how upset he was that iPhone’s emojis are growing more diverse thanks to the “P.C. police.”
And, yes, Colbert directly addressed the controversy: In a segment called “Who’s Attacking Me Now,” Colbert joked that “we almost lost” and then went through just how the controversy went down, through a sort of mirror-world reality whereby “Colbert,” the conservative on-air persona, saw his attempts to support his fictitious and racist alter ego get misinterpreted online.
I was hoping that Colbert would take this and run with it, and he did it spectacularly.
He managed to take advantage of the "controversy" to continue to point out the hypocrisy of going after him and leaving the Redskin's new "out reach" to the native American community virtually untouched.
If you did not see the show last night I highly suggest that you click the links provided above and enjoy seeing the master at work.
BD Wong, who is gay btw, frequently played a therapist on the various Law & Order incarnations. Colbert's wearing Redskin gear just reinforced the satire. But then, it's a well-known fact that most Republicans are irony-deficient. They don't seem to understand the Colbert's character itself is a joke.
ReplyDeleteOOh! "Irony-Deficient"! I'm so stealing that! :)
DeleteO/T - Gryphen, how can you not like Ed Schultz - the only one on TV talking about American workers, the post office, and changed in mind on the XL Pipeline after visiting reservations? Seriously, he is the only one who covers the middle class.
ReplyDeleteI agree.
DeleteWe are so lucky Suey made this an Asian thing and distracted from Dan Snyder's "Let them eat cake" diversion for keeping the Redskins name, because 62% of the world's population is so taken advantage of, while the 1.6% of America's Indigenous population has it easy.
ReplyDeleteConsidering that the only people who were "offended" were people who would never watch the show, and probably not anything else on Comedy Central either, the whole #CancelColbert thing was surreal self-parody from the get go.
ReplyDeleteReminded me of Palin's "Fire David Letterman" campaign.
DeleteThe man is an absolute genius at his craft.
ReplyDeleteI especially loved how he pointed out Michelle Malkin's hypocrisy. You know, how she was offended by that tweet for attacking Asians, yet she wrote a book that defended the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. But what else is new with her.
ReplyDelete