My Dinner with Colbert: a post-mortem

Okay, I've watched it twice now, and here's my take:

1. White House Correspondents Dinner bits are like the office Christmas Party skits we used to write and perform in grad school: The whole premise is self-congratulatory and self-indulgent, but it's great fun if you're the one getting to write the material. The best material is, therefore, the shortest. Their invariable failing is that they go on too long, with too many inside jokes.


2. I think that the "Colbert bombed" meme, currently in rapid-response deployment from the right, doesn't have much to it. That's a huge, accoustically crappy room, and--despite what we outsiders or the people at the front table might think, the activities at the front of the room are the least important to the attendees. They're there to see and be seen, to network for their next job, to find the person they slept with after the last Dinner, and so on. Colbert could have done jumping jacks in the nude and only gotten a slightly more animated response.


3. Bush's bit, with his clear-speaking alter ego, was funnier than it will get credit for, although it also ran so long it killed the effect.


4. Now to the centerpiece of the evening: Colbert had several moments that were, indeed, funny as hell and satirically right on target. I've said before that the evolving genius of Colbert's schtick is that it lets him "go right" on conservatives--applauding, rather than attacking, their worst moments and eagerly demanding more. (One dreads to use the phrase "Swiftian irony" at a moment like this, but there we are.) Tonight was a good example of that. In one sense, it did indeed show brass balls on Colbert's part to do that material in Bush's presence. But in another sense, it's at least as safe to do it there as to do it in the Comedy Central studio in New York.
   
   The Editor & Publisher report that the Bushes left the dinner in a sour mood probably oversells the outcome: They dislike the things anyway, and they knew they would be taken safely back inside the bubble again once it was over, to a place where jibes like Colbert's didn't exist, didn't matter. For all we know, if no one briefed Bush on the existence of Colbert he might well have had no clue who he was. And it was way, way too long: those great few moments came in a speech that was something like ten minutes long. The speech could have been edited down by at least a third (the film by half) and been funnier for the improved pacing, but then both would have lost all the insider-ness that is the Dinner's sine qua non. Always remember: This wasn't a prime-time special edition of the Colbert Report; it was a side-show at a D.C. insiders' love fest.
   


5. Finally, and for reasons that should be clear by now, I think Carla's right: the event itself is as disposable as a Kleenex; what will last--if anything does--are the few sound bites that manage to get some traction outside the bubble. My favorite remains the bit about "deck chairs on the Hindenberg:" it was fast, perfectly timed, precisely delivered, and captures a nice truth about both the Bush administration and the fact-free spin battle that characterizes much of the coverage of it.

Your thoughts?