Posted 5/06/2006 10:24:00 AM by Douglas

Much ink has been given to Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, but I really like this one. As it says, the truthiness hurts.

His point was spot-on. Irony is dangerous and must be handled with care. But America can rest assured that for the moment its powers are in good hands. Stephen Colbert, the current grandmaster of the art, knows exactly what he was doing.

Yes he does, but does anyone else? I know that (most of) the people in the room at the WHCAD have above average intellect, but as I've said many times before: Turn on Colbert for 10 minutes and then compare with Hannity O'Reiley. The only difference is Colbert is trying to be funny, and the others don't know how ridiculous they seem. It's still hilarious, but something about his performance at the WHCAD left me cold. The irony of his satire is lost when he's performing in front of the people he's satirizing. And apparently I'm not the only one:

Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone's clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function," wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram." "It's critical and destructive, a ground clearing."

The direct assault is always easier to defend. Leno's wise-assery is easy to detect and refute. It's not obvious to everyone that Colbert is joking, and that's his genius, and why he bombed.

But nearly half a century later, the ideas of the French, as evidenced by our "freedom fries," have not found a welcome reception in Washington. The city is still not ready for Colbert. The depth of his attack caused bewilderment on the face of the president and some of the press, who, like myopic fish, are used to ignoring the water that sustains them. Laura Bush did not shake his hand.

It's one thing to say the emperor is wearing a funny hat. It's quite another to say that the emperor has no clothes, and that's exactly what Colbert does every night at 10:30.