I thought Stephen Colbert had reached a comedic peak recently with that “Swedish model/emulate-the-Vikings” word-of-the-day bit. But his Doom Bunker segment tonight had me actually doubled over with laughter.
It’s nice to ache from comedy. It happens so rarely.
If we thought that the advent of elegant, optimistic, at-least-publicly-nonsnarky Barack Obama — a Barack Obama who is not, so far, himself snark-worthy — meant the death of irony, then we were wrong again. The death of smart, snide, laughing-on-the-outside-cuz-we’re-crying-on-the-inside humor has been announced again and again since 9/11, and yet it is still going strong.
And now that the right-wingers have been driven round the bend by the abject failure of their philosophies and the (again, so far) wholehearted embracing of Obama by the American public… now that we can straight-up laugh at right-wing idiocy because their idiocy is not actually in the White House and has no power to affect us… oh, man, the fun we’re having. Rush Limbaugh and CNBC and all the rest of them have started bringing the crazy in full force, and it is comedy gold.
Werewolf Congress… hyperinflation putting silver bullets beyond the reach of the military… Oh my god, I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard. It felt great.
I laughed up my second lung at the fact that we have Medal of Honor winner and member of the Council on Foreign Relations Colonel Jacobs is now quotable as saying, “We would never shoot nuclear weapons at Decepticons.” :D
oh man, i’m sorry i missed that. note to self: make sure to watch Colbert rebroadcasts sunday morning!
Each episode is rebroadcast the following day at 8pm, so you don’t have to wait until Sunday.
Plus it’s on Hulu.com, assuming you’re in the U.S. :)
8:00 p.m. is an awkward time for me… i’m either at my aunt’s having dinner and watching what she likes to watch (and it ain’t colbert), or i’m just getting home and thinking about dinner. at least i know i can catch up on the week’s worth on sunday morning. as for YouTube or Hulu or whatever — i’m still in the land of the technologically challenged as far as access to these sites goes. the internet police at work have seen to that, and the antiquity of my machine at home just does the same thing with less malice.
If you can, make sure you catch yesterday’s Daily Show as well–it was probably the most brilliant episode I’ve seen in several years. I wouldn’t say it was the funniest (more along the lines of “laughing to keep from crying”), but it was spot on in its slam of CNBC and the other business media members.
Every clip from every episode of the Colbert Report is available on the Colbert Report website. (www.colbertnation.com) I live in Italy and haven’t missed an episode yet!
“I wouldn’t say it was the funniest (more along the lines of “laughing to keep from crying”), but it was spot on in its slam of CNBC and the other business media members.”
I just came here to say that as well. Here’s a link:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_03/017155.php
(Not a direct link, but I’m giving traffic to the people who showed it to me).