Colbert Dishes On Bush, Glenn Beck, and MSNBC

James Warren
Dec 23 2009, 9:23AM

When Chicago's Second City comedy troupe held a weekend-long 50th anniversary bash, the obvious highlights were Friday and Saturday shows with Martin Short, Steve Carell, Bonnie Hunt, Jim Belushi, George Wendt, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, Shelly Berman, Rachel Dratch, Robert Klein, Jack McBrayer and tons more.

There were also panel discussions, including one in which alumnus Stephen Colbert and writers on his "The Colbert Report" held forth. Along the way, they revealed what didn't get said at a controversial Washington engagement, underscored the impossibility of parodying Glenn Beck and wondered just a bit about the comedic forays of serious-minded news hosts like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

With a tape of the hour-long session from Second City, I just watched as Colbert explained the creation of the "well-intentioned idiot" he portrays. ("The character really means well. He's willfully ignorant of what you know and care about. He's not mendacious and stupid. He's innocent and stupid, like a puppy who's urinating on your politics, not destroying your politics.") But a question-and-answer period inspired the best exchanges, starting with one on Colbert's appearance at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

In character, Colbert created apparent dyspepsia among some portion of his Washington A-list political and media audience. The dinner draws more than 2,500 and is a very curious function, underscoring the depressingly incestuous relations between the political establishment and a few too many journalists, some of whom so deeply crave the acceptance of whoever's in power. It's morphed from a rather staid gathering into a smoochy celebrity gang bang and sucking up to politicians, with media organizations inviting both people they cover and famous actors and other pop culture stars as guests, and doing so with competitive fervor in their search to look hip.

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