More Colbert

TIME's TV critic, James Poniewozik, has a good column on Stephen Colbert's now infamous Correspondents Dinner performance.

But I think that the people who said Colbert bombed reveal
less about their political leanings than about their
understanding of the media culture we live in now. The
reason they think he flopped, of course, is that he didn't get
many big laughs in the room. And once upon a time, that
would have been what mattered. You might have caught
the performance on C-SPAN, but really, who would have?
So Colbert would have lived and died on how well he
entertained the room, and how well the room spoke of him in
the media the next day.

Today, however, thanks to the reposting of the Colbert video
online, any of you who are curious about Colbert's
performance have probably already seen it. Colbert wasn't
playing to the room, I suspect, but to the wide audience of
people who would later watch on the Internet. If anything,
he was playing against the room—part of the frisson of his
performance was the discomfort he generated in the
audience, akin to the cringe humor of Da Ali G Show. (Cringe
humor, too, is something probably lost on much of the
Washington crowd at the dinner, as their pop-culture tastes
tend to be on the square side.) To the audience that would
watch Colbert on Comedy Central, the pained, uncomfortable,
perhaps-a-little-scared-to-laugh reaction shots were not
signs of failure. They were the money shots. They were the
whole point.

I think that's exactly right. Anyone who has watched Colbert interview people for the Daily Show knows that he feeds on their uncomfortability. He gets laughs by asking the question that no one else would ask, by catching people off guard. That's his bread and butter. The White House Correspondents Dinner was a dream opportunity for Colbert, a chance to have all the objects of his ridicule in the same room at the same time. And he took advantage of it.

Anyone who thinks Colbert bombed should ask themselves whether they think this helped or hurt his career. Can there be any doubt that it helped it? If he had delivered a forgettable but crowd pleasing Leno-esque performance, it would have generated almost no publicity and would have been a big let down to his fans. Instead he stayed true to his "character," endeared himself forever to his existing fans, and a week later, we're all still talking about his performance. If he bombed, he bombed like a fox.