Dowd Defends The Funny

The Harvard Review printed an interview with Maureen Dowd that presumably took place when she was in Cambridge giving a speech back in October. I've heard of long lead times, but really. In it she professes her well documented love for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert:

Well, I watch the Colbert Report and the Daily Show more than I watch the nightly news. And I really think the alarm about that is silly, because I think if you watch Colbert and Stewart, you learn a lot.

Plus you can talk them into writing columns for you. She thinks humor has a place in political discourse.

When I first started my columns, Michael Kinsley and Bill Safire said to me, “You have to stop doing humor columns because you’ll be seen as too girly.” And I said I would never take humor out of politics. I think it’s a fantastic way to tell the truth, but to take a fresh angle that can lure people in and tell them something true. And I grew up loving Johnathan Swift and Evelyn Wong, and I think we can use humor and satire to get at the truth and a larger and different audience.

And by "Evelyn Wong", she (or the under-educated transcriber) means Bennett Cerf.

But I'm not expecting her to drop into the comments section of this blog anytime soon. While recent columns display a dazzling skill with Google and YouTube, she professes to be technologically ignorant.

I’m not very technological. Someone gave me an iPod a year ago but I’ve only just learned how to turn it on. And I don’t blog or anything but I think journalism is about the story or the narrative.

But she doesn't dismiss the power of blogs:

It doesn’t matter to me what the delivery system is. The more, the better, the more populist, the better, the more people engaged, the better, but in the end, it’s about the story and about human nature.

And who should now more about human nature than her.

BlogWatch: Colbert Live

Stephen Colbert, political talk show satirist and ersatz presidential candidate, and Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd’s Sunday pagemate, held an event in New York at the 92nd Street Y. AlisaR of DailyKos was there and gave of full report including this little insight into the secret workings of the Vast Liberal Mockery:

Maureen Dowd asked him to write his column before she was aware he was running for president. (‘Is it real or a joke?’ someone asked; "what’s the difference" he replied.) "Why do you want me to write your column" he reportedly asked Ms. Dowd; "Why did Tom Sawyer want that kid to paint his fence" she retorted.

Even off the cuff, Dowd is making brilliant and perceptive allusions to classic American literature. Tom Sawyer used psychology to trick kids into doing his work for him. And judging by the continued internet buzz over the ColbertDowd column, someone is getting plenty of mileage from it. Just who is using who here?

The anecdote is confirmed by Mixed Media blog at Portfolio.com. Jeff Bercovici also reveals that the heavy lifting for that column was really done by two Colbert Report staff writers. There goes my theory that Dowd was doing a brilliant spot-on Colbert meta-parody. So it goes.

The Colbert Conspiracy

If the purpose of the Stephen Colbert stunt casting in the Sunday New York Times was intended to draw attention to the Times Select-free Maureen Dowd, it worked. The blogosphere was abuzz with the news. The general consensus was that stale Colbert was better than hot Dowd. Let’s take a look at some of the more creative headlines:

Caveat Bettor, per Diem: The best Maureen Dowd column ever
Baseball Crank: Best Maureen Dowd Column Ever Written
Wonkette: Best Maureen Dowd Column Ever Written by Stephen Colbert
SteveSilver.net: Best Maureen Dowd Column Ever

Spot a trend? Plenty of other places simply took the stunt at face value:

DailyKos: NYT: Stephen Colbert Replaces Maureen Dowd
NoFactZone.net (a Colbert fansite): Stephen Colbert, ‘New York Times’ columnist?
The Body Politik: Colbert Takes Over Maureen Dowd Column
Verum Serum: Stephen Colbert Writes for Maureen Dowd (and Frank Rich)
Dara Weinberg: Colbert writes Maureen Dowd’s column

The only place that was the most remotely skeptical was Editor and Publisher with their caveat:

But was this just another bit of fakery, and Dowd actually did an excellent job of mocking the mock views of Colbert? Was it faux keeps or not?

Here at MoDo Manor, we tend to be from Missouri when it comes to the guest voices inside Dowd’s head. What would her motive be to pretend to be a fake commentator when she already has a bully platform of her own? The most quoted line in the piece was the faux Frank Rich part:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Frank Rich, the theater critic turned pundit, briefly bumped her off the premiere Sunday spot for a while until calmer heads prevailed. Could this be her way of exacting a pound of his ample flesh? It's obvious that Rich cribs off Dowd fairly frequently. By putting words in the mouth of a Straw Colbert, she gets to have her revenge and eat it cold.

You would think that Comedy Central would have been in on the act from the start if the real Colbert were involved, but their blogpost was possibly ambiguous:

Yesterday's New York Times readers were in for a surprise when Maureen Dowd 'dared' Stephen Colbert to write her op-ed column. In it, Stephen both squelches and fans rumors that he might run for public office

Note the ‘scare’ quotes around ‘dared’. Plus, that post didn’t appear until 1:34 p.m on Monday, a good 36 hours after the NYT page went live. And let’s face it, if Colbert and his TV overlords were caught flat-footed by Dowd, would they let on?

The sign of a good conspiracy theory is that facts never get in the way of thinking with your gut. I think Colbert would agree.

The Colbert Retort

A Mock Columnist, Amok
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 14, 2007

The phrase “running amok (or amuck)” comes the Malay word “Amuco” and has come to mean any sort of violent senseless rampage. Amok Time would be a good name for a Fox News Network talk show.

I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

George Will wrote a column this week on how tough it is to be a billionaire in "today’s plutonomy". Will may have been writing tongue-in-cheek, but as with MoDo, sometimes it can be tough to tell since so much of his opining already verges on self-parody.

Stephen Colbert is a character on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report played by Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert the character is a caricature of an over-the-top right-wing commenter. Stephen Colbert the comedian is a hopeless commie pinko.

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)
By STEPHEN COLBERT

Stephen Colbert’s new book is non-sequiturly titled I Am America (And So Can You!). For the second week in a row, Dowd has gotten her inspiration from the New Releases table at BigBoxOfBooks™. Dowd then channels the Stephen Colbert character for the rest of her column:

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito.

James Bond super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld always had a fluffy white cat. Sarah Jessica Parker’s vapid self-centered Sex and The City character drank lots of fancy alcoholic drinks while extolling the travails of living in upper-class Manhattan. The mental image of Marueen Dowd as a slutty, drunk, evil despot probably appeals to a lot of people. I know it does to me.

Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Frank Rich is a fellow New York Times columnist who is more predictable and reliably liberal than even Maureen Dowd, except with a narrower range of hot-button topics.

I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

This sort of left-handed compliment is Colbert’s stock in trade, most famously exhibited when Colbert hosted the White House Correspondents Association dinner and called George Bush an idiot in so many words to his face.

Others point to my new bestseller, “I Am America (And So Can You!)” noting that many candidates test the waters with a book first. Just look at Barack Obama, John Edwards or O. J. Simpson.

Or Clarence Thomas.

Nevertheless, I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.

MaureenColbert has a very salient point here. While all the Republican candidates are white, male, and nominally Christian, some evangelical groups have sent up smoke signals threatening to support a third party candidate if the Republican nominee is insufficiently theocratic.

And there is the rub with ouroburosian attempts at satire. Many people are incapable of discerning the difference and it becomes tough to see the humor. At what point does a liberal columnist imitating a fake right wing pundit come out of the other end of the rabbit hole as an unironic Rush Limbaugh clone?