Word: colbert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Satire is essentially political; it builds an Us-vs.-Them dialectic and aims its barbs at Them. The reader or listener is expected both to get the joke and to agree with its political thrust. For example, the audiences for The Daily Show and Colbert, are part of the shows' (basically left-wing) Us, laughing at the (basically right-wing) Them who are the butts of the jokes. WWN recognized no such niceties. It tore down that wall. It ripped not just at the goofiness of pop culture but at its own readers' prurience and gullibility. ("Redneck Vampire Attacks Trailer...
...Stephen Colbert formed the word "truthiness," but decades before, WWN was the original friend of faux. It played the truthiness game at world-class level, as a joke on its readers and the rest of the media. Touting itself as "The World's Only Reliable Newspaper," WWN pioneered the notion of straight-faced news comedy. Yes, Saturday Night Live had inaugurated its "Weekend Update" in 1975, but the tactic there - as in the Brit and U.S. versions of That Was the Week That Was, in the ?60s, and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report today - was essentially a real...
...there may be one more border to cross. When Apatow appeared last week on The Colbert Report, and was asked what was possibly left to show in male comedies, he instantly answered, "A penis." I don't doubt that Apatow was speaking ironically, yet there was self-revelation there to, since that's exactly the sexual organ that the fellows in Knocked Up and Superbad (and his earlier The 40-Year-Old Virgin) are most obsessed...
...Colbert Report has an occasional segment called "Cheating Death," which is introduced by the image of Stephen facing the hooded figure of Death over a chessboard. That's a reference to the 1957 film The Seventh Seal, a medieval morality play written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Colbert, who switches chess pieces while Death is distracted, parodies the role of a knight (Max von Sydow) who puts his soul on the line to save a few lives during a season of plague...
...body of work that imposing, that serious, was bound to inspire parody - and did, long before Colbert. Allen, for example, had written a burlesque on The Seventh Seal in The New Yorker. Sometimes whole movies were tongue-in-cheek tributes to Bergman: George Coe and Tony Lover's 1968 American short De Duva (where "water" is the subtitle for the mock-Swedish "aitch-two-oh-ska") and the 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The spin-offs might be serious, they might be farcical, but all paid tribute to Bergman's unignorable influence...