Stephen Colbert: not just ANY puppet

Last week I received a link to Stephen Colbert's roast of President Bush last week at the White House correspondents dinner. Widely circulated across the Internet, this video clip struck me with Colbert's vicious, biting tone, masked as a humorous sendup of the president. Ok, maybe not so well masked, and not so humorous. But I think that salon.com hit the nail on the head when assessing that:

Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part in the White House correspondents dinner -- an incestuous, backslapping ritual that should be retired. For that, he had to be marginalized. Voilà: "He wasn't funny."

The point is not so much that Stephen Colbert failed to garner more than a chuckle from his gawkish, awkwardly smiling audience. Instead, he followed his own agenda and made critical statements about the president, to the face of his supporters. True, Mr. Colbert didn't say anything new, but he was cruel and, many times, inappropriate. It seems like it flew in the face of what the President would have liked to see: humor that even he could chuckle at. A cunning man keeps his enemies close at hand. He also gains from the wit of the people surrounding him. By being intentionally inappropriate, taking the same grammatical and cultural missteps that our President has taken in the past, Mr. Colbert called direct attention to our nation's boss's failings as a professional.

And I actually found a lot of his lines funny. My friend told me that the Colbert piece were reminiscent of Mitch Hedberg, who I've never seen but whose jokes were more smart statements: not pieces that you laughed at but ones that hit you 10 seconds after the fact. Colbert had that Colbert Report randomness, that stream of consciousness that I'm afraid is characteristic of the way my brain works. Normally I don't find his work funny, but I chuckled this time, and as salon.com indicated, who gives a damn whether he was funny anyway?