From Maine to Japan

I find Stephen Colbert fascinating and challenging. Part of why he's both so funny and so appealing are the moments when the mask of his savage irony slips away and you see just how angry he is about exactly all the things "Stephen Colbert" is pretending to celebrate. He does a delicate sort of scarf dance of persona--for example, I watched the election night special he and Jon Stewart co-hosted. Now, "Stephen Colbert" was miserable at every state that Obama won, and kept wistfully predicting a comeback from McCain. But at the moment when California was called for Obama and it was official, both Colbert and Stewart stopped talking. For a long, long moment they both looked away from each other, shuffled papers, took a drink of water, and took a couple of deep breaths. It was like...they didn't really trust themselves to stay in character at that moment, so they just did nothing at all until the information processed. I have no idea if they planned it or not--they must have--but it was oddly moving.

I watched Colbert's Christmas special this week, and it has that same strange mix in it. "Stephen Colbert" waxes eloquent about the War on Christmas and other conservative topics, but when he and his guest stars (an improbable lineup of Elvis Costello, Toby Keith, Feist, and Willie Nelson) sing "What's So Funny Bout Peace Love and Understanding," it's all the more moving because "Stephen Colbert" is not supposed to mean it, and yet Stephen Colbert so clearly does. The duet he sings at the end with Costello is a beautifully complicated brew of cynicism and hope, and it becomes impossible to tell what's "Stephen Colbert" and what's Stephen Colbert:



Elvis: There are cynics, there are skeptics
There are legions of dispassionate dyspeptics
Who regard this time of year as a maudlin insincere
Cheezy crass commercial travesty of all that we hold dear
Stephen: When they think that
Well, I can hear it
But I pity them their lack of Christmas spirit
For in a world like ours, take it from Stephen
There are much worse things to believe in.

Stephen: Believe in the judgment, believe in Jihad
Believe in a thousand variations on a dark and spiteful god
Elvis: You've got your money, you've got your power
You've got your science, and all the planets going to end within the hour
Stephen: You've got your dreams that don't come true
Elvis: You've got the ones that do
Stephen: Then you've got your nothing
Both: Some folks believe in nothing
But if you believe in nothing
Then what's to keep the nothing from coming for you?

"Christmas: There are Worse Things to Believe In" is a motto I'll remember when I get too grouchy about canned carols and forced cheer.

The special ends in one of the weirder recursive loops I've ever seen, when Santa shows up to give Colbert "the greatest gift of all": a DVD of Colbert's Christmas special "The Greatest Gift of All." "So wait," barks Costello, "That's the DVD of the special that we're in the middle of making right now?"

Ow, my brain.