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Colbert speaks the ‘truth’
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
Stephen Colbert—comedian, satirist and host of the award-winning television show “The Colbert Report”—told a cheering crowd of fans, “I bring you the truth,” during an appearance at UB on Friday.
Colbert, whose political relevance has risen beyond his show through such events as a mock campaign for president and an infamous lampoon of President George W. Bush during the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, spoke before a sold-out crowd in Alumni Arena as the final speaker in UB’s 2007-08 Distinguished Speakers Series.
In his opening comments, Colbert directed his sharpest jabs at his audience, made up of primarily UB students, for its political apathy.
“Where’s your passion?” he asked. “You are the young people of America! Forty years ago, the children were in the streets taking over administration buildings. They were in the streets of Chicago saying, ‘The whole world is watching!’”
Today’s students are too busy blogging about political events to go out and protest, he said. Pointing to an incident last fall at the University of Florida when campus security used a taser on a college student during a speech by U.S. senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry, Colbert said everyone simply stayed in their seats “looking bored.” After talking about the incident on his show, he said a student who was at the event emailed to say: “What were we supposed to do? The police told us to stay seated.”
But Colbert also was careful not to let his own generation off the hook for its role in current affairs.
“I was happy to get here tonight just to get a breather from the real world,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed what’s happened in the last four years since you came here, but... the world’s broken. We broke it. Oh boy... I feel bad.”
With the same combination of right-wing bluster and incisive political satire common on his television show, Colbert riffed on some of the major issues facing the U.S., from illegal immigration—“just to be safe, we should probably dome the entire country”—to the economy. “I’m not going to say ‘everything’s fine’ and give you a copy of ‘Oh, the Places You’ll Go!’ when you graduate,” he said. “The places you go might be Bangalore, India, if you want a good job.”
The comedian also talked about the ongoing presidential campaign by roasting not only the current presidential candidates, but also the presidential hopefuls who have dropped out of the race. Colbert called John McCain a “maverick” for “launching a campaign for the presidency without money or personal appeal,” and Barack Obama’s speech before the 2004 Democratic National Convention a “historic moment” among Democrats “because for many of them it was the first time someone cool was willing to talk to them.” He also poked fun at Hillary Rodham Clinton for her aggressive campaign tactics, suggesting she’s spent her entire life pursuing the presidency.
In terms of his own short-lived run for president, Colbert said he never expected the joke to go on so long.
“I never thought it would go beyond seven days,” he said. “At one point...I was polling at 13 percent in a national poll. I was ahead of [Christopher] Dodd and [Dennis] Kucinich and [Bill] Richardson. And I was being sponsored by a nacho cheese tortilla chip. I’d say I kind of won.”
That sponsorship also brought him close to legal trouble for violating campaign finance reform laws, he added, noting that his network’s lawyers were able to keep the campaign alive only by taking advantage of loopholes in Federal Election Commission rules.
Colbert, who recently won a Peabody Award on the strength of his episodes about his campaign for president, explained that when “The Colbert Report” is at its best, it’s about using his character to “embody some hypocrisy.” In this case, he said, “overtly grabbing for funding.”
“By wrapping the idea in nacho cheese dust, we did seven shows on campaign finance reform that people who were 18 were willing to watch,” he said. “And that was what I was most proud of—that we took a difficult subject and we made it palatable.”