Colbert's Irony and Twitter Don't Mix
One of the unwritten but widely respected rules of satire is that somehow, somewhere, someone simply isn't going to get the joke.
And if they don't get the joke, you get taken seriously about something you don't really believe.
That makes Stephen Colbert, who has turned a satirical version of himself into a Comedy Central superstar of fake news, one of the bravest people on television.
It is therefore appropriate that he has found himself caught up in a real-time example of a new hazard of the digital age: Satire and Twitter go together like drunks and driving.
"Who would have thought," he lamented on Monday night, "that a means of communication limited to 140 characters would ever create misunderstandings?"
No kidding. Or maybe he was. It's sometimes hard to tell when the real Colbert dives deeply into his self-described role as "Stephen Colbert," the "willfully ignorant" right-wing pundit.
He was responding in this instance to last week's angry Twitter eruptions over a segment in which he satirized Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder's new nonprofit. Aimed at helping Native Americans, it is called, yes, The Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation.
Colbert heard irony in Snyder's use of a racial slur to name a foundation that was created to perfume the slur that many, including me, hear in the pro football team's name. So fake-conservative "Stephen Colbert" responded by announcing his own group: the "Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever."
Edgy? Uncomfortable? Yes. But satire is supposed to make you at least a little uncomfortable. In his show's context, the joke worked. The audience laughed with Colbert and groaned at Snyder's tone-deaf -- or tone-indifferent -- cluelessness.
Trouble came later, Colbert explained this week, when "a web editor I've never met" tweeted his Ching-Chong punch line without its set-up or even posting a link to any mention of Snyder's foundation.
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