Schwarz
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here we are reminded that irony was suspended shortly after 9/11. i contend that that suspension lasted through the 2004 elections and only returned in a significant way via colberts wh press diner appearance. i think katrina was a crack in the magicians mirror we know as the bush and co parallel universe. the cheney hunting event was a little peak behind the curtain too. a society needs irony to self regulate. some things can only be spoken first through humor. then we start to get comfortable with the truth again and with that a return to normalage. i find the term bush "bubble" a misnomer or at least an severe understatement. thats why this story is so significant and a watershed event for me. for the first time in a long while i sense weve turned the corner in accepting/not accepting the whole bush co alternate universe routine. god bless andy breckman too, i think he missed the irony memo altogether.
"Soon after Sept. 11, Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, announced that we had reached the "end of the age of irony." The comment was particularly odd since Carter was one of the co-founders of Spy, the often brilliant and irony-rich satirical magazine of the 1980s.
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Why did the media so uniformly ignore Colbert? For one thing, his performance as a Republican-licking pundit held a mirror up to the media's sycophancy as much as it criticized Bush. So, by ignoring the criticism of them, the media whores performed in just the way Colbert described their reporting of, say, the period before the Iraq invasion. They ignored reality -- it has a liberal bias, Colbert observed -- and slavishly licked Bush's ass clean.
Of course, many in the media, as well as the conservative robots on the Internet, produced their own reason for not reporting Colbert's shtick. It simply wasn't funny, they said. Well, of course it isn't too funny if your own idiocy was being reflected.
That again comes back to the question of satire's function. It isn't meant to produce slapstick laughs. It is meant to make people think about the absurdity in which they are participating. In fact, satire assumes, and usually demonstrates, that its object is capable of behaving differently."