This image of Stephen Colbert, created by Todd Lockwood, illustrates some of Colbert’s favorite images: the American flag, religion, and the eagle.
In his persona seen on Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert is an ultra-right-wing conservative who promotes defunding Obamacare, insults what he sees as liberals’ blind devotion to the current president while regularly praising the previous president, and often preens over his Peabody and Emmy awards. According to Shaheed Nick Mohammed, associate professor of communications at Penn State Altoona, Colbert’s character “is widely perceived as a faux conservative media figure.”
The key word is “faux.” Mohammed says, “If you read the history of the show, it was announced as a parody. He has exact parallels to other shows. He is an obvious sendup of these characters.” As with so many of the “talking head” shows, Colbert takes himself very seriously, addresses his audience authoritatively, and presumes that his audience agrees with whatever he says. More specifically, Mohammed points to Colbert’s segment titled “The Wørd” as modeled on The O’Reilly Factor’s “Talking Points Memo” segment on the Fox network.
Despite what may seem obvious, though, what Mohammed has realized is that not everyone gets the joke. Utilizing the online forum for the Colbert Report, part of what is known as “Colbert Nation,” Mohammed studied commenters’ posts to see how Colbert is viewed by both liberals and conservatives. He found that “Posters expressing liberal and conservative sentiments to the online forum for The Colbert Report differ significantly in their recognition of the parodic nature of the show.”
Some forum commenters—11 percent—believe that Colbert is actually a conservative, according to Mohammed’s study. Those who understand that Colbert the conservative is a character will sometimes post comments attempting to explain the satire to those who don’t get it or merely defend Colbert with “that’s just how good he is.” Both groups, those who get it and those who don’t, are participating in “selective perception,” also known as the “Archie Bunker effect.” They choose their side—Colbert is parody or Colbert is “real”—based on their own personal beliefs, much like liberals and bigots did with Archie Bunker on All in the Family.
Colbert has sometimes pushed boundaries with gender and racial issues, most recently with a tweet that spurred a #CancelColbert movement on Twitter. For people familiar with Colbert, the tweet was just part of another joke mocking the owner of the Washington Redskins. Taken solely on its own, however, the tweet became a racist comment about Asians. And yet the woman who started and promoted the #CancelColbert movement said to the New Yorker that she didn’t want the show canceled—so she can be counted among those who “get it.”
Mohammed shakes his head about the 11 percent who don’t get it. “There were all of these cues. I don’t think it’s forgivable to not get it. I think funny is intelligent. Real funny requires smarts. If you don’t get it, you’re just laughing at the puppets, at the clowns.” The results of his study on people who get the joke and those who don’t were published as “‘It-Getting’ in the Colbert Nation Online Forum,” Mass Communication and Society 17, no. 2 (2014): 173–94, DOI:10.1080/15205436.2013.804935.
In his next work, Mohammed will move from a faux character to our interest in junk news. “It’s almost as if there’s still an information vacuum,” he says, “and that’s not good. We want to get the information but we know less and less. It’s like a ‘diabetes of information’—we’re all gorging ourselves on useless calories of information. Useful information is now the broccoli of the information age—it’s good for you but most of you don’t want to eat it.” To address that tendency, he is exploring the trend of subjunctive documentaries, such as the recent Mermaids: The Body Found. He says, “What we’re being fed is useless mush at the expense of following things that are important.”
—Therese Boyd, ’79