Dartmouth Alumni Magazine Ruins Stephen Colbert’s Reputation
When "The Colbert Report" first came out in 2005, I predicted it would be a failure. The Colbert persona, while funny, is exhausting in large doses, and I thought people would get sick of him. This turned out not to be true, for awhile.
Enter Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, which has just come out with the best example I've seen of what happens when you try to hijack something that people have already perhaps had a bit too much of and...completely ruin it.
The idea of the magazine's article is that, since Colbert's conservative alter-ego went to Dartmouth, wouldn't it be a hoot to do a profile of him as though he really were an alum? Except, you know, make it just a tiny bit sarcastic so the VERY acute reader can get in on the joke?
The result is, to steal a phrase from the NYT's A.O. Scott, "antifunny."
For this gut-buster of a parody, the magazine chose a writer named Robert Sullivan D’75 -- known, based on an Amazon search, for this exact kind of digestible, not-really-that-creative humor. Sullivan mixes fantasy with fact, so that it's not clear to the average reader what is and isn't true about Colbert's history. Nor is it clear what, exactly, is funny about all this.
He devoured Tolkien and became so desperately addicted to the video game Dungeons & Dragons that his parents sent him to an exorcism day-camp. The counseling there didn't take, and he is remembered as an all-afternoon D&D player during his Hanover years. Those years began in 1982, after Colbert chose Dartmouth over Hampden-Sydney College, Bob Jones University and Northwestern, to which he was also accepted.
I really don't know what kind of joke this is. Hampden-Sydney and Northwestern are in there because those are schools the 'real' Colbert attended, and Bob Jones presumably is in there for a cheap joke. But like, what is the point of this article?
So at the end of the day -- at the end of his storm-tossed Dartmouth career -- Colbert has found himself, found his voice and, in a way, found his mission. Yes, it had been a trial on regular occasion, but finally worth the travail.
Dartmouth had made Colbert strong. Dartmouth had made him smart. As it did for so many of us, the College had propped Stephen Colbert up and readied him to become the great man he was destined to be.
Or not to be.
To be honest, the humor here is so opaque (Are we laughing at the fact that the whole article is based on a false premise? At the anecdotes Sullivan invents about fake Colbert's college years?) that I'm just confused.
I get it, it's not fact or fiction, it's "truthiness." Still, this article is not worth the time to understand.
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July 11th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
I haven’t read that article yet, but I think that your post was quite painful to read as well…
July 12th, 2008 at 1:54 am
At first I was skeptical of your premise, that something related to Colbert could be anti-funny. Then I read this little gem. It simple is bad, that kind of anti-funny that makes you wonder “if you will ever learn to laugh again.” What the fuck was the point of this is the act question that needs to be asked.
September 9th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Are you serious?? First of all, the most legitimate complaints you levy against this article are that you’re confused by it and don’t really understand either why it’s funny or what its point is.
Did you not pick up on the fact that the article is from the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE? As in, a magazine for Dartmouth alumni. You are a sophomore at Brown University, in case either you’d forgotten or any of your readers (if you have any) didn’t know. Therefore, it doesn’t seem all that surprising that you would miss most of the subtle references, ironies, and humor in the article that apparently only a Dartmouth student or alumnus would be likely to get. Now, if Colbert’s fictional persona had gone to Brown, and the article had been written by a Brown alum for the Brown alumni magazine, then I wouldn’t say boo to you…but they weren’t. So you come across as rather ill-informed and ignorant, unfortunately for anybody unfortunate enough to stumble across this article.
Please do us all a favor and, in the future, give your opinion on matters that a) you understand, and b) you have a right to be giving your opinion on.
I’m disappointed that every time I happen to log onto Ivygate, the articles I read tend to be whiny, pedantic, and generally just obnoxious, to say the least. It would be wonderful if you wouldn’t mind cleaning up your collective act, thanks.
November 1st, 2008 at 6:21 pm
As someone who (shock!) has never actually seen the Colbert Report, I was baffled by the piece. Parts of it were clearly fictitious, yet none of it was funny. As this author aptly notes, it’s unclear what its purpose was. Maybe to further piss off the college’s non-liberal alumni?
(Yes, I graduated from Dartmouth in the late 90s, I got all the ‘inside’ references, and still found it to be a literary turd).
April 12th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Well, I went to Dartmouth, and I also watch the Colbert Report, and the piece was hystrical! The funniest part was that the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine did it to him before he did it to Dartmouth. And Dartmouth does sport more of the shrillest, off-the-deep-end right wingers among its alumni than any other Ivy so it’s especially entertaining for that unpleasant truth to made comical by way of Colbert’s sarcastic personna. He is extremely intelligent, startling many a guest. And intelligence is a common ingredient in the very best satire.
Your article write, Mr. Bechek, is another story. I can’t wait to read his next review of something he knows nothing about. I’d leave it at that except for the unjust attack on author Robert Sullilvan. When I clicked on the Amazon.com “footnote” that appears to support his broad, insulting charge that Mr. Sullivan is “known for this exact kind of digestible, not-really-that-creative humor” what I found was a children’s Christmas book that is intended to be heart warming, not funny. Since it was published in 1996 it has received 16 customer reviews, and every one of them is a full five stars. The book makes a scientific case that Santa Claus is real and reading such a book with a child who might be just starting to wonder proves to be a powerful emotional experience for both adult and child. Thank-you Mr. Sullivan!
Judging by the people who read and reviewed your book, you have produced something reliably wondrous.
Reliably wondrous. I wouldn’t use those words to describe Mr. Bechek, who derides a man’s entire body of work blithely, ignorantly and inaccurately. I could call him a lazy scholar or intellectually dishonest but this is, after all, about comedy and he is, after all, a sophomore.
And so I conclude that he is a twerp.
Ivygate and Mr. Bechek, you are both capable of much better.
As for me it’s back to googling for instructions on ordering a Dartmouth Alumni Magazine subscription for two of my nephews.