Everyone's always telling me I should watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. So, one day when I was "drafting" in the wake of someone else's wireless signal, I YouTubed a few episodes of each and generally enjoyed myself. Then, recently, I received this e-mail from the God's Politics blog set up by Jim Wallis and Sojourners/Call to Renewal. It contains an embedded video of Bill O'Reilly appearing on Colbert's show, and a link to a vid of Colbert appearing on O'Reilly's show. I watched both, and laughed some, since Colbert is often a funny guy, and even O'Reilly gets lucky once or twice. But in general I found the combined 13 minutes rather pointless and generally exhibiting the worst aspects of the liberal attitude, what I'm calling "empty irony." (Click the title to see for yourself.)
The main idea is that, instead of actually talking about something, as even Stewart tried to do on Crossfire (or whatever show that was), Colbert turned on the irony from the get-go and never turned it off. O'Reilly, recognizing this, tried to absorb some of it, dish some of it back, and occasionally to actually explain his point of view - to which Colbert responded with more irony. What's the point of this kind of behavior? On the one hand, he's parodying O'Reilly's rather inane and obnoxious interview style in which he doesn't actually listen but just pounds his guest with his opinions. On the other hand, his irony fails to attain any substance beyond "I'm more ironic than you," which is silently premised upon "Because my position is superior to yours."
The comments were disappointing as well, running to the tune of "Yay for Colbert," "Yeah, Colbert is funny," and "O'Reilly is dumb, hah hah hah." O'Reilly's stubborness and narrow-mindedness is certainly frustrating, but must one's response to him be in kind?
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