Guy Yedwab

Writing The Essay

4/8/2007

Press Correspondent's Feast of Fools

(Ex 5)

Many people have said that many things have changed since 9/11. The lackadaisical, warm,

peaceful, profitable, and all-in-all enjoyable 1990s ground to a sudden and stomach-dropping halt. A

whole new generation of young adults, the first born after the intensely political Cold War and the first

to grow up in a far less political climate, was suddenly thrust back into the political world. An attack on

American soil made it, at least briefly, of earth-shattering importance to follow world events.

Unfortunately, the political and journalistic climate of the period was not the most welcoming

for the new youth. As Dan Sneirson observes in Entertainment Weekly, “These are trying times. Beset

by towering gas prices, never-ending wars, and perplexing celebrity-name fusions, we had nowhere to

turn for guidance...until one man stepped forward and administered a wedgie to our troubles.” The man

is Stephen Colbert, and the wedgie Sneirson describes is the viciously topical satire he provides each

night, four nights a week. As James Poniewozik says in TIME Magazine, Colbert's format is a direct

reaction to the media pundits through which many Americans now get their news: “...A hypocrite. A

blowhard. Pompous, superficial and vain. He is 'poorly informed but highly opinionated.' [as Colbert

puts it.]”

The show, it seems, is trapped in the moment. It is filled to the brim with cultural references of

today. As James Poniewozik observes, one of his comedic strains harkens back to the “2004 election,

when the Bush campaign positioned itself against ivory-tower liberal élites.” In future years, will we

remember what President Bush campaigned on? Probably not, no more than we can remember what

President Eisenhower ran on, or President Taylor (did we even have a President Taylor?). On the other

hand, his connection to his Eliot-style “tradition” is evident. Celia Wren, writing for the Catholic

publication Commonweal, compares his satire to “the savage bite of Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest
Proposal.'” His satirical style of swaggering like the TV pundits he criticizes is reminiscent of the

“Feast of Fools” which took place during the Middle Ages, where (as Dario Fo describes in his book

The Tricks of the Trade) “the chosen minstrel presented himself in a caricature mask of the local

bishop. Accompanied with great, if deliberately grotesque, pomp into the cathedral...the minstrel

ascended the pulpit to deliver a tongue-in-cheek sermon, in which he mercilessly mimicked all the

homilies and actions of the bishop during the preceding year.” Neva Chonin, in the San Francisco

Chronicle, described his appearance at the Press Correspondent's Dinner (in the presence of President

Bush, just as the chosen minstrel of the Feast of Fools would be in the presence of the bishop) thusly:

“There was a time when it was a court jester's privilege to tell the emperor he had no clothes on and

then to escape with his head. Colbert resurrected that tradition. He faced a hostile room and a hostile

president and listened while his quips fell into silence....Find the video online. Watch it and weep,

because only a jester can save us now.”

On the one hand, the Correspondent's Dinner was entirely concerned with the modern day and

current events: the jibes were aimed at today's Fox News and today's Bush Administration. Current

scandals, rather than institutional structural failings, seemed to be the target of his jibes. But as Chonin

points out, the real subject of the evening was the relationship between the press and the government; a

bulwark of democracy, debated since long before the American Revolution. Chonin isolates the

“privilege to tell the emperor he had no clothes on,” and it is precisely that element which runs through

the entirety of Stephen Colbert's show, and his performances in the public. He is not afraid to tackle the

hypocrisies in the media, in religious figures, in politics both at home and abroad—and even,

sometimes, at himself.