The Colbert Report and media satire theory

¶ … Colbert Report has been on the air a little less than two years. The program was an immediate hit, following the Daily Show on Comedy Central and carrying the pretense of the Daily Show into a new realm. Together, the shows represent both a comment on the politics of the day and a satire on television itself, specifically on television news and television commentary. The shows are related, with Colbert himself having spent some time as a correspondent on the Daily Show before creating the Colbert Report, and the two shows at times work together to show different aspects of the news of the day and to comment on the news from what seem to be different political perspectives. Of the two, though, the Colbert Report is the more daring and the more difficult to pull off each day, for Colbert plays the role of a right-wing host, yet manages to do so leaving no one believing he himself is anything but a liberal observer making fun of the real right wing in the country. Achieving this balancing act is difficult, and in part it is achieved through the deliberate over-use of various conservative icons in a way that represents the semiotics of television used to create an ambivalent vision of the right wing and to do so in a way that keeps the audience in on the joke at all times.

One observer noted when the show debuted in 2005, "Who knows whether Colbert will be able to sustain a persona of an obnoxious megalomaniac on a daily basis?" ("The Colbert Report" para. 1).

He has in fact done quite well at playing this part and at making the "character" appealing. A key moment in the rise of Stephen Colbert came not on the show itself but when he served as speaker for the annual Gridiron Dinner at which Washington journalists and politicians socialize. One part of the dinner has long been the appearance of a comedian, usually to poke fun at journalists and politicians alike. However, the comedian is expected to be gentle, especially when playing to the President, who often attends. Colbert did so, and even in his persona as a right-wing ideologue, he managed to use the dialogue of the Right to skewer the President and the Republican establishment. The response was silence from the Republicans and embarrassment from the journalists, who claimed that Colbert simply was not funny. Anyone seeking the speech on You-Tube, however, knew that he was very funny, and his growing fan base saw his willingness to criticize the President to his face as a major plus.

Still, the structure of the Colbert Report uses signs and symbols from both politics and television to create a persona for the show itself and to evoke the two worlds the show satirizes. By any measure, the show is self-reflexive and transparent about its effort to show up the failures of political leaders and television commentators alike.

David Chandler discusses the importance and meaning of signs in human interactions and notes that signs may be words, images, sounds, odors, flavors, acts, or objects, but they are things that "have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning" (Chandler, "Semiotics for Beginners" 1). Such objects and words gain meaning over time by the way they are used in different social ceremonies. Colbert makes use of a variety of such signs and symbols and often does so both to evoke the meaning that has attached to them over time and to suggest the limitations or outright falsity of that meaning at the same time.

It was Ferdinand de Saussure who offered an explication of the linguistic approach and the meaning of language and contributed to the development of structuralism. He saw the nature of communication as deriving from ongoing processes and also considered the relationship between the human being and language as a social relationship. He offered an analysis of the different planes on which language operates and so pointed to areas for study and comprehension to be applied to literary criticism as to language studies in general. In emphasizing process, he also emphasized structure, for he denied that we can begin with units -- with words, say, or phonemes -- and instead saw language as deriving meaning and value from the interplay of elements, from the process of language itself. It is possible in Saussure to see the development of the idea of examining the work as a whole, as a unit unto itself, as a complete entity rather than a collection of smaller parts. Saussure took an approach that was descriptive rather than prescriptive, describing how people use language in culture rather than telling them how they should use language. This is in keeping with what Michael Agar says about the way language is rooted in a culture, with culture being the way people live, the references they understand, the nature of the world as they see it, and so on. Both Agar and Saussure see language emerging from life and from the way people in a given culture express themselves to others in that culture, and this links the two in terms of describing what happens.

Saussure saw language as a manifestation of culture, following Durkheim to the effect that society "is something that existed before a particular individual was born into it" and that it is something that "will continue to exist long after he or she is gone" (Agar 38). Culture at any given time is a manifestation of this society, a version of the larger social order that evolves over time while always having some elements that continue and define the society. For Agar, Saussure is a genius who invented semiotics and who found a way to look inside the circle, as Agar calls it, meaning "the circle that people... draw around language" (Agar 20) and that Agar believes must be erased. He sees Culture as the means to do this. What he seeks is communication rather than language, with language being only one of the ways to communicate. Indeed, Agar sees culture as necessary to have communication at all.

In a sense, then, Saussure defines the circle and how language is viewed within that circle, while Agar seeks to erase the circle and produce true and ongoing communication. He says that the circle "isolates grammar and the dictionary, and Saussure helped to draw it" (Agar 48). Agar does believe that what Saussure offered can be used to get beyond the circle, and that is the goal for Agar as well.

Semiology is the general science of signs. It was first proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics. That was in the early years of this century, but the idea was not developed until the 1960s, when anthropologists, literary critics, and others developed the semiological science that Saussure had postulated:

Barthes was an early advocate of semiology and much later, in choosing the title of his chair at the College de France, named semiology as his field, though he stressed in his inaugural lecture that his personal semiology was quite tangential, if not inimical, to the growing discipline he had once promoted. (Culler 70)

Semiology developed from structuralism, which itself was the name given to modern linguistics because of Saussure's view that language was made up of structures. Barthes took this idea up as well, and he followed the anthropologist Levi-Strauss in using linguistics as a model for the study of other human symbolic systems (Lavers 3-4).

Structuralism begins with the analyses of Levi-Strauss. Poststructuralism was a movement starting in the 1960s and 1970s. Structuralism instituted a change in the way literature was treated. Prior to that time, literature was isolated and separated, and after, literary criticism was more engaged in the discourse of the human sciences. Structuralism was attempting a more scientific examination of literature in all its dimensions, but some saw the supposed detachment of critics as offensively antihumanistic and unrelated to the values of a Western liberal education. In fact, the rise of structuralism demonstrates how other disciplines were having an influence on literary criticism. Structuralism and Semiology constitute a virtual field in themselves, designatable simply as "theory" because, by taking meaning and the varying conditions of meaning as their "objects" of study, they cut through traditional "humanities" and "social sciences," such as literary studies, philosophy, history, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, all of which directly influenced literary theory since the late 1960s. Structuralism is dedicated to explaining literature as a system, of signs and codes and the conditions which allow this system to function, including relevant cultural frames. It assumed a linguistic methodology that was scientific, and so it became scientific as well. The first assumption is that the objects studied are intelligible and can be explained. It is a strong analytical technique, but its analytical technique was seen by some as also being its greatest weakness because they focused on the ways in which a text was like other texts, comparing the structures of different texts based on similarities of function, such as character development, plot, theme, ideology, and so on. Changes within a text are accounted for as transformations in the synchronic system, and this meant a tendency to fail to deal with time and social changes, which concerned many of the method's critics from the beginning.

Ferdinand de Saussure offers an explication of the linguistic approach and the meaning of language and contributed to the development of structuralism. He sees the nature of communication as deriving from ongoing processes and also considers the relationship between the human being and language as a social relationship. He offers an analysis of the different planes on which language operates and so points to areas for study and comprehension to be applied to literary criticism as to language studies in general. In emphasizing process, he also emphasizes structure, for he denies that we can begin with units -- with words, say, or phonemes -- and instead sees language as deriving meaning and value from the interplay of elements, from the process of language itself. It is possible in Saussure to see the development of the idea of examining the work as a whole, as a unit unto itself, as a complete entity rather than a collection of smaller parts. Just as Saussure examines a sentence or a paragraph in terms of a process, so the literary critic examines the given work in terms of the process of meaning that is involved in the collection and interplay of its elements (Saussure 160-167). Chandler writes,

Contemporary semioticians study signs not in isolation but as part of semiotic 'sign systems' (such as a medium or genre). They study how meanings are made: as such, being concerned not only with communication but also with the construction and maintenance of reality. (Chandler 4)

Colbert constructs his own reality and uses a number of semiotic signs to achieve it. Many are signs used to signal patriotism, including a number of American flags and a suspiciously vulture-like American eagle that flies right into the camera with its beak wide open, as if devouring the audience. Colbert himself haws the demeanor of a stern schoolmaster much of the time, lecturing his audience in a way that brooks no argument, though he also does so in a way that shows no real malice and that often winks at his own attitude. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show acts as an anchor, imitating the network news to a degree, though he is more folksy and also more varied in his approach than a network anchor would be. The semiotics of the set mirrors that of the network news, however, with a table at which the anchor sits, with rear projections of news footage, and with other correspondents to talk to on the monitor. Stewart creates the aura of a network broadcast precisely to say again and again that this is not a network broadcast at all. He is also often self-reflexive, stating openly that this is fake news and making fun of the correspondents for their feigned seriousness.

Colbert is really imitating a different sort of news show, the ideological talk show format used by real right-wingers like Bill O'Reilly on the Fox Network. His attitude is very much like that of O'Reilly, except that O'Reilly has no trace of self-criticism and no aura of winking at his audience. He is instead deadly serious, and his anger toward guests is used as a club to keep them silent, often to the point of turning off their microphones while he continues his criticism of them. Colbert feigns the same belligerent attitude, but he always knows when to draw back and when to let the audience know that he is not fully serious at all.

He carries his super-patriot act so far that it is clearly over the top, aggrandizing George Bush in a way that his audience clearly does not agree with, and dong so in a way that tells his audience neither does he. He will belligerently ask his guests, "George Bush, a great president or the greatest president," as if that were a sensible and widely different choice. The O'Reilly-like act is recognized as such by his audience and even by O'Reilly, who was a guest on the show last year and thus showed one of the few signs that he also had a sense of humor.