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.