A very Stephen Colbert weekend

If you enjoy a comic rapport with Stephen Colbert, you probably had a very satisfying weekend. If you don’t, well, you’re probably the President of the United States. Colbert, the merciless political satirist with the slyly ironic O’Reilly carapace, brought the pull-no-punches humor of The Colbert Report to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he quickly let it be known he wasn’t there to make friends. Excoriating both the administration (“‘[R]earranging the deck chairs on the Titanic‘… is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!”) and the media (“tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew”), he found himself faced with the toughest of tough crowds. Not since Yakov Smirnoff played the Politburo* has such fine material foundered on the rocks of such sullen shared guilt. (You can read Colbert’s full, uncut transcript on this totally nonpartisan site.) And the <a href=”http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002425363
“>Prez? They hardly ever cut to him. The only person who looked less amused was Laura.

What makes the Colbert tick? Friends and enemies alike should check out Morley Safer’s interview with the comic on 60 Minutes. Rounding off this very Colbert weekend: Re-airings of “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” a classic Robert Smigel cartoon series from SNL’s TV Funhouse. Colbert and former Daily Show colleague Steve Carell provided the voices. (Yes, much like fellow “journalist” Jeff Gannon, Colbert once did “gay-for-pay.”)

So our man Steve continues to prove his mettle. If nothing else, this weekend’s work earned him a shiny new wiretap.

*(this never happened, but should have)

addCredit(“Stephen Colbert: Haraz N. Ghanbari”)