Colbert, One More Time

The powers-that-be in the traditional media are still telling all of us why Colbert's anti-Bush rant wasn't funny. It's a definitional thing, it seems. It wasn't funny because the experts tell us so, and telling why something is not funny seems a lot easier to do than telling why something is funny.

But I found it hilariously funny. I laughed so much I started hickupping. And what was funny about it was the fact that here Colbert was acting out the daydream lots of us have had: to actually tell in the face of the authorities what you think of them. And the authorities had to sit and listen and even pretend to enjoy it. They couldn't get up and have the police drag him away into the "Allowed Protest" cages, they couldn't have a major newspaper erase his comments from a blog thread, they couldn't write long articles about the inexplicable rage of Colbert and so on.

So they do the next best thing which is to say that Colbert really wasn't funny. When he was, in the way that really mattered, and that way wasn't about the specific jokes he told.

You might like this little ode to Colbert.