Is Stephen Colbert Funny?

Scott Ballard asks his readers what they think of Stephen Colbert. "Is he funny?" Scott wonders.

I have some ideas on that and on the broader subject of satire as it's practiced today.

I've never watched Colbert's show. I was turned off by his White House Correspondents Dinner attempt at satire, just as I was to Don Imus' run at the same goal at the same venue during the Clinton Administration. Neither were funny, just cruel, petty, and pointless. So, whatever incentive I'd previously had for checking out Colbert's show has long been lost to me.

I also don't watch Jon Stewart, from whose show Colbert's character was spun. I thought that Stewart was so completely incapable of creating laughter back during his MTV days that I've been unable to even try watching his current late night offering.

There's a place for satire, of course. But the problem is that there are so few people who can actually do it, far fewer than the number of those who think they can.

I believe that we need authentically good satire these days, though.

Whether it's in politics, corporations, church hierarchies, academia, the sciences, entertainment, or the media, too many people on whom the responsibilities of power have been conferred view their power as an entitlement. They think of themselves as an elite class and they seem to regard the rest of the world, who they're supposed to be serving, as inconsequential nobodies.

This ideology of entitlement, which crosses all sorts of philosophical lines, is a worthy subject for satire.

But much of what passes for satire these days is nothing more than reverse elitism, a hipper-than-thou approach that can only sniff disdainfully at others.

Or worse, it's character assassination, evident even in the monologues of Jay Leno and David Letterman.

Satire should enliven and rouse. When Charles Dickens or Jonathan Swift satirized a society that accepted a Social Darwinism that looked down on the poor, they did so from a positive perspective that insisted people knew better. So did Mark Twain in his send-ups of nineteenth-century American pomposity.

But what passes for satire today seems to create a destructive, personal, undiscerning cynicism that gives up on positive change. It's the "humor" of the eat, drink, and be merry crowd, nihilism with a derisive giggle, fatalism that sees no point in addressing the elitism that satire should lampoon.

We see the effects of this incessant, resigned cynicism in people whose primary source of news and information is the late night character assassins or the radio and TV talk show hosts of various political persuasions.

There are many elitists who need to be knocked down a peg or two. But these alleged satirists aren't really doing that so much as they're coarsening culture and encouraging hopelessness. At least that's what I think.