Speaking Truthiness To Power

I would guess that at least a few people who may be reading this are aware of the performance by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner on Saturday night. If not, you can read about it from these detailed posts by Peter Daou and Chris Durang from The Huffington Post.

Trying to capitalize on that (I’m sure), “60 Minutes” aired an interview correspondent Morley Safer conducted with Colbert last night. I don’t know if this was a new broadcast or a rerun.

Some of Colbert’s “schtick” included this…

When 60 Minutes visited, Colbert was reviewing a piece to air that night (on “The Colbert Report”) — an interview with the congressional delegate from the Virgin Islands, Donna Christiansen.

"Isn’t it time to drop the whole virgin act?" Colbert asked Christiansen in his interview.

"What would else would we call ourselves?" she asked.

"Trollop Island? … The Been Around The Block Islands? ...The Not Until The Third Date Islands?" Colbert joked.

"Can we just leave it at Virgin Islands?" she replied.

As far as growing up was concerned...

Colbert has been going for laughs since he was a child, growing up near Charleston, S.C., in a large very family. He is the youngest of 11 kids.

Despite coming from Charleston, Colbert does not have a trace of a southern accent.

"At a very young age, I decided I was not gonna have a southern accent. Because people, when I was a kid watching TV, if you wanted to use a shorthand that someone was stupid, you gave the character a southern accent. And that's not true. Southern people are not stupid. But I didn't wanna seem stupid. I wanted to seem smart. And so I thought, 'Well, you can't tell where newsmen are from,'" Colbert explains.

As far as life-altering experiences that probably affected his career, I would guess that it takes a lot of strength and courage to overcome this type of a family tragedy, especially with humor...

"It has been said, I don't know if it's any truth to it, that all good comedians have some painful experience in their in their lives. Any truth to that thesis, do you think?" Safer asked.

"Sure," Colbert replied. "My father and two of my brothers died when I was 10. I think I did my best to cheer my mom up."

The three were killed in 1974 in an Eastern Airlines crash.

Asked if the tragedy still affects his life, Colbert says, "I know that after they died, nothing, I was 10, you know? I was still in school. It was in elementary school. But nothing seemed that important to me. And so, I had immediately had sort of a, I won't say a cynical detachment from the world. But I would certainly say I was detached from what was normal behavior of children around me. It didn't make much sense. None of it seemed very important. And I think that, you know, feeds into a sense that acceptance, or blind acceptance of authority, is not easy for me."

The entire interview can be accessed from here.

My lefty “betters” in the blogging world have already been gushing over Colbert’s wonderful performance at the dinner on Saturday for the last two days. To that, I only wish to say thank you to Colbert for what was actually quite a courageous performance which was also truly funny.

Update 5/3: And as you might expect, our dear corporate media friends have been either ignoring Colbert's performance or focusing on some Bush impersonator who appeared also. Meanwhile, Digby (via Atrios) recalls another performance by a host at this event years earlier which was much more brazen but looked upon more favorably.