Bob Hope’s Spirit, but No Cheesecake

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
NYT
Published: June 11, 2009

The first comedy show entirely taped, edited and broadcast in a war zone didn’t look like your average U.S.O. tour. Except when it did. In Baghdad this past week the host of “The Colbert Report” was so imbued with the spirit of Bob Hope that he actually twirled a golf club — a Hope trademark — as he told jokes to troops in a former palace of Saddam Hussein. Stephen Colbert, the host, described Iraq as “so nice, we invaded it twice.” Even a taped sketch on Tuesday, in which Mr. Colbert debated himself on the issue of gay soldiers, wasn’t much of a departure from Hope’s old stand-up routines in places like Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay.

“Miniskirts are bigger than ever, even some of the fellas are wearing them,” Hope told troops in Da Nang in 1967. A beat. “Don’t laugh,” he added. “If you’d have thought of it, you wouldn’t be here.”

Mr. Colbert’s four-day “Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando,” sponsored by the U.S.O., was unexpectedly charming. His interviews with generals and even an Iraqi deputy prime minister were pleasant, not barbed, and his stand-up routines proved as easygoing and good-natured as many a Bob Hope performance. Mr. Colbert sometimes let his comic persona as an monomaniacal chicken hawk to the right of Bill O’Reilly slip a little, but mostly he stayed in character, and even that matched up with Hope’s self-caricature as someone egotistical and cowardly.

(More here.)