On Religion: How The Trump Era Transformed Colbert’s Satire Into Sermon
(ANALYSIS) Soon after Stephen Colbert landed “The Late Show,” he welcomed tycoon Donald Trump as a guest and did something shocking — he apologized.
“I said a few things about you over the years that, that are, you know, in polite company, perhaps, are unforgivable,” Colbert said in 2015.
“Apology accepted,” said Trump, smiling.
That encounter was light-years away from what happened after Trump celebrated the recent CBS decision to cancel “The Late Show.”
On social media, the president said Colbert's "talent was even less than his ratings.”
Colbert fired back in his monologue: “Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go f—- yourself.”
While Colbert retains a faithful congregation, some fans who loved his sly blend of satire and progressive Catholicism mourn his decision to preach to only half of America, said media scholar Terry Lindvall, author of "God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert,” published in 2015.
“He made you laugh and think,” said Lindvall, reached by telephone. "When he turned on the rage, he turned mean. He turned bitter. He acted like he was a prophet, not a jester.”
Sadly, Lindvall added, the Trump era turned Colbert into "a liberal fundamentalist. ... He drank the Kool-Aid.”
The goal, in “God Mocks,” was to offer a “bumpy tour through Rome, Jerusalem and Lilliput,” arriving at Comedy Central. Lindvall praised Colbert's early work on “The Colbert Report,” in which he pretended to be a blowhard conservative pundit, creating an upside-down persona who could mock secular progressives and atheists as well as thinkers on the right. Conservative guests, especially Catholics, were often treated with respect.
That was satire, wrote Lindvall, recognizing “a moral discrepancy between what is proclaimed and what is practiced. ... The biblical satirist shares in the blame and shame of his defendants. He may be God's prosecutor, but he is also entwined with the people he ridicules. A true satirist sits in the dock with those who are guilty. ... The satirist finds that none are righteous, including himself.”
Yet wit has power, he added, as noted in Shakespeare's words from “King Lear” that "jesters do oft(en) prove prophets." But even when acting as a prophet, the satirist "tears down in order to build up.”
Lindvall created a “quad of satire” with four crucial elements: “Moral purpose versus ridicule and humor versus rage.”
The sweet spot: Blending humor with moral purpose, as opposed to a marriage of ridicule and rage.
In his classic satire “The Screwtape Letters,” Christian apologist C.S. Lewis pretended to be a high-ranking demon, noted Lindvall in “God Mocks.” But when describing effective ways to tempt the weak, the Oxford don was clearly describing his own weaknesses as well as those seen in the elite culture he knew so well.
As the famous Catholic journalist G.K. Chesterton noted: “The farce is at my own expense. ... No reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of the story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.”
From Lindvall’s point of view, a high point in Colbert's jester era was his 2010 appearance before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law. Colbert quipped: "I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan, in a spa, where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian.”
But Colbert also discussed the Gospel of St. Matthew, noting that migrants “come in and do our work, but don't have any rights as a result. And yet, we still ask them to come here, and at the same time, ask them to leave. ... You know, 'whatsoever you did for the least of my brothers,' and these seemed like the least of my brothers, right now.”
Looking ahead, the question is whether Colbert can find a venue in which he returns to humor while avoiding pure acid, said Lindvall.
“The goal of a true satirist is to take on your enemies and make them see your point of view and to understand it and, maybe, even be forced to engage with it," he said. "You jab at them with a purpose."
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.