The Colbert Report Report

Watching The Colbert Report I am most reminded of Mel Brooks's 1993 movie Robin Hood: Men in Tights. That movie is a scene-by-scene spoof of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner, which was so wretched as to be unintentionally funny. Mel Brooks's spoof merely articulates all the criticisms you already had about the Costner flick in a ham-fisted style, rendering it both superfluous, and a little dull. The target for Brooks was a little too easy, and a little too obvious. Far more entertaining would be to watch the original and heckle it MST:3K style yourself.

Now, I don't mean to say that there's nothing to like about The Colbert Report. It certainly has it's moments, but making fun of Bill O'Reilly is simply too easy and too obvious to warrant half an hour, four times a week. By the third show, they're already repeating jokes and I find myself fidgeting for want of something as brilliant as in the first episode, when Colbert, promoting the use of the word "truthiness" promised to "feel the news at you."

Part of the problem is Colbert's character. He's pompous, arrogant, self-righteous, and always willing to put himself at the center of attention. (Particularly brilliant are monologues by Colbert standing in front of a portrait of himself standing by a portrait of himself.) However, it gets monotone after a while, and lacks the excitement of the real jerkalists he's imitating because, clearly, Colbert doesn't believe any of this. He's forced to harass guests who were nice enough to come on his show because that's what the bristly O'Reilly would do. So far, they're on to his game. Stone Phillips and Colbert engage in a contest of gravitas, and Fareed Zakaria asks if Colbert is ten times funnier than a comedian in Bangalore who would work for ten times less. Sometimes in the interviews Colbert, with little experience in interviewing guests, seems to be stuck, asking himself, WWBD? (What Would Bill Do?)

The show will have to be retooled. The question is when. Right now, I'm willing to watch it, because I like Colbert as a comedian, but the show is less insightful than the Daily Show, and less informative than Countdown, and less entertaining than either. But I suspect that the Daily Show crowd will slowly start to peel off, and they'll have to come up with a different shtick or fade off into cancellation.

So how do they fix it? One approach is to bring on the kind of crackpot pundits that Scarborough and O'Reilly find - the kind of people whose only credentials are that they write a blog and were on the show last week. Let Colbert run the kind of interviews he is famous for on the correspondent bits of Daily Show, but on the set in real time. This approach definitely has the potential for Jerry Springer style meltdowns, but might resurrect the dullest parts of a show without a bite.

Another approach is far more risky. Let Stephen Colbert be Stephen Colbert the man, not Stephen Colbert the character. The man, as revealed during an interview with NPR is likeable, smart, and funny. Colbert's character is only one out of three. Sure the show will probably become more like a basic cable Bill Mahar, but is that really a bad thing?

The choice I think would be the funniest is to let Colbert take on all of the jerkalists, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Matthews, Franken, and so on. He could target different styles and political views on each episode, either creating a character for each, or bringing in a supporting cast. In other words, let the show become a sketch comedy send-up of the whole genre, not just O'Reilly.

For now, I'll keep watching, hoping for something brilliant to happen, but I think in the next two or three months, something is going to have to change on the show to keep it fresh and watchable.