Welcome to Second Look, a new feature at The Avocado in which members revisit and re-examine a piece of pop culture. Check the sign up thread if you’re interested in participating!
Content warning for discussion of racial caricatures.
It’s hard to understate what a pop culture juggernaut Stephen Colbert was during the heyday of The Colbert Report. From truthiness being named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2006 to his portrait to being hung the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to a treadmill on the ISS being named after him to a bridge in Hungary not being named after him, to then-President Obama appearing to deliver the famous segment The Word, for nearly a decade he was an ubiquitous figure in pop culture – and played a pivotal role in the political awakening of a generation.
And I am part of that generation. As a college student in the late 00s, I was slowly becoming more attuned to politics. And a big piece of that was watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to learn about the news of the day – and to poke fun at the hypocrisy of… Mostly Republicans, but also the media landscape, the political landscape, and a lot of American culture in general. My friends and I even took the trip from North Carolina to Washington, DC, to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
As an adult, my political awareness continued to develop. I began reading the news more, listening to NPR on my way to work, and began participating in political discussions – first through a Disqus channel offshoot of The Atlantic, and then over here to The Avocado after a member of both communities shared a recommendation to this place when Disqus sunset their channels feature (thanks to all of you for welcoming me). The person I am now is pretty different from the guy who watched The Colbert Report nightly. I’ve grown from a “both sides are terrible” to “I’m a liberal, but we really need to check ourselves” to… Well, honestly, probably still that but more strongly liberal
The genesis of this project started pretty innocuously. I was replaying one of the Dark Souls games and doing a lot of co-op, which meant a lot of downtime. In a search for some background noise to have on that didn’t require deep focus, I wound up finding old episodes of The Colbert Report. As I started watching it, I was pretty fascinated, and I started thinking about writing about the experience of watching the show in the modern day and using it as a springboard for a feature about revisiting pop culture. 1447 episodes (and several playthroughs of various Dark Souls games) later, I am proud to say that I have watched it all. So, after all of that, what’s it like to watch The Colbert Report in a post-Trump world?
… I don’t know.
A brief recap for the uninitiated. The Colbert Report was a satirical news show that aired on Comedy Central from 2005 to 2014. As opposed to its counterpart The Daily Show, The Colbert Report specifically satirized right wing news personalities – specifically Bill O’Reilly, but most people in the Fox News world. Stephen Colbert’s fictional persona was brash, egomaniacal, clueless, and patriotic. He delivered the news of the day as an avid proponent of George W. Bush, then an avid critic of Barack Obama, then a diehard fan of Mitt Romney who he quickly forgot once the 2012 election was over. Recurring segments included “The Word” (a parody of Bill O’Reilly’s “Talking Points” in which Colbert delivered some commentary while humorous bulletpoints appeared on the screen), “Better Know a District” (featuring interviews with Congressional Representatives from the various US districts), and the ThreatDown (counting down the top 5 threats to America). Along with interviewing celebrities, authors, and other noteworthy people of the day, this was a vehicle for delivering 22 minutes of comedy 4 nights a week.
And it was hilarious! Trying to pick out highlights from the show is a challenge, and I expect everyone who watched could probably name a different moment that they still remember years later. For me, the moment I keep thinking about is Colbert breaking down at the name Munchma Quchi. Other highlights of Colbert’s tenure – extending beyond the show itself – is his savage appearance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which he poked fun not just as President Bush but also the journalists who enabled Bush’s wars. Colbert even made an appearance on Capitol Hill, in which he testified – in character – at a hearing concerning labor done by immigrants working on America’s farms. But there were lots of moments that packed unexpected laughs – big and small.
And that humor shines through in unscripted bits of the show. Colbert is a great interviewer, effortlessly weaving in jokes and sometimes being able to catch his guests in bits of astounding hypocrisy. And he can do all of that while staying completely in character. The character really was a masterclass in satire, and Colbert’s ability to play it deadly straight was a rare talent.
Through its humor, The Colbert Report was also genuinely educational. One of the most famous stories from The Colbert Report was his ongoing project to develop a SuperPAC and explain to viewers the ways dark and untraceable money could influence the political process. The endeavor lasted about two years, walking through the entire process of forming a SuperPAC and the ways they could and could not operate. Honestly, it’s worth reading the Wikipedia article just to hear about the entire saga – truly fascinating, and the way he was able to do this even over the concerns of parent company Viacom.
But it’s also frustrating. Colbert caught flak early on for doing a racist imitation of a Chinese person he named “Ching-Chong Ding Dong”, and he continued to trot out the clip throughout the show’s run. While satire is part and parcel of the entire show, the continued use of the clip felt like spitting in the face of the very genuine concerns of marginalized communities – a controversy which blew up in a big way in the final year when a context-less tweet was sent out, sparking the #CancelColbert hashtag to trend on Twitter in response.
Sometimes it’s anodyne. Satire felt pretty sharp back then, in part because I just wasn’t used to it and was becoming more familiar with politics. Now when everyone has a Twitter (ugh) account and I read all the Hot Takes and Hottest Jokes from the internet everyday in the Politics Thread, a lot of it doesn’t feel as funny or as novel. There are many reasons that nothing has quite come to take the place of Colbert (or The Daily Show) since their moment in the zeitgeist, but I’d bet a major piece of it is just that there are thousands of people with a Twitter, a BlueSky, a TikTok, or whatever, spouting the exact same kind of jokes that you’d see on Colbert.
It’s also just fun to watch as a time capsule. As a news and pop culture show, it’s a walk down memory lane through some of the biggest moments in America, even beyond the news, for a decade. I’m old enough now that it’s an enjoyable trip down memory lane, and interesting to see the way things have – and haven’t – changed. Movies I remember, movies I’ve forgotten. Celebrity news that captured our attention, some leaving a longer mark on pop culture and some just a brief blip. Much like Ching-Chong Ding Dong, some of that comes with heavy cringe and discomfort – it’s remarkable the jokes and things that culture does and doesn’t consider acceptable now compared to 2010, but sometimes it’s just neat to remember my life and times back then.
Even so, perhaps the most overwhelming takeaway is that it’s just a bit of a bummer. The show reached its era during the Obama years, a time in which the world seemed full of hope and optimism. The nascent Tea Party was laughable and hard to take seriously. Unfortunately, hindsight puts all of that in a new late. Colbert making jokes with frequent guest Mike Huckabee wasn’t endearing to begin with, and Huckabee’s faux-folksy charm rings even less true now that we’ve seen what the modern Republican party is. Segments making fun of of Trump’s ridiculous proclivities aren’t funny at all after America gave him access to the White House for a second time. And truthiness, The Colbert Report’s first landmark on pop culture, isn’t really funny when it’s a reality of an entire political movement. As if to encapsulate that, one of the show’s final episodes discussed GamerGate, which had just exploded. An ugly movement grew in strength and way too many of us missed the signs until it was too late.
Is that Colbert’s fault? No, of course not. Even if he hadn’t courted Republicans to make appearances on his show, there was nothing he could have done to prevent the tide of rising Republican resentment that resulted in Trump’s election. But all of the jokes, all of the ways he pointed out the hypocrisy, all of it packs a little less punch because we had to endure four years of Trump and today begin enduring four years more.
We often want to break things down into a binary. Was The Colbert Report “good” or “bad”? Over in the PT, we’ve seen that debate before (more often with Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, since Stewart is more politically active whereas Colbert has retreated from politics into a more neutral slot as Late Show host). And ultimately, I don’t think it neatly fits into that binary. Perhaps it comes from my own bias – as someone who was a huge fan back in the day, it’s hard to acknowledge the ways it failed. But I also think the way it helped so many people in America become more engaged with politics is important. Would my politics have turned out the same without Colbert? Perhaps, but it’s hard not to imagine my own position without acknowledging how much I learned by watching.
Unfortunately, if you want to revisit the series yourself, you don’t have many options. For years Comedy Central kept clips and episodes online, but recently they removed nearly all of them. Some clips remain on Youtube, but the deterioration of Youtube’s search means you’re more likely to find clips of Colbert from The Late Show rather than clips from The Colbert Report. Maybe it’s better off buried in the past, but I can’t say I regret going through it. It was funny, it was infuriating, it was fascinating – and it was worth it.