I guess Stephen Colbert figures that when your whole proposition is to satirize conservatives, you can pretty much get away with anything. Looks like that might not be true, although Comedy Central is now circling the wagons and trying to shield Colbert personally from responsibility for the tweet.
Colbert, or whoever, was trying to lampoon Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and his announcement that, in lieu of changing the Redskins' name, he will establish the Original Americans Foundation to provide various forms of support to, er, "Original Americans." Colbert's satiric answer to this:
That's a screen shot via Variety. The original tweet has been taken down and Comedy Central has taken the unusual step of tweeting on the Colbert Report account that Colbert does not personally control the Twitter account and that Comedy Central staffers are responsible for the tweet.
That surprises me a little. Everyone knows that but they don't usually come out and say so, and I would have expected Colbert's defenders to try to weasel him out of this by claiming he was just trying to get a rise out of those hyper-sensitive conservatives, and boy did it work, blah blah blah. The backtracking shows that Comedy Central realizes they've stepped over the line here, and dragged Colbert over the line with them.
Suey Park is on the warpath - uh oh, did I just offend "Original Americans"? - and her #CancelColbert campaign is trending heavily this morning on social media.
Since Colbert's whole schtick is to satirize a conservative talk host, he probably figures he can say just about anything he wants and claim he's just pushing the envelope to demonstrate the horrible racism of those dastardly right-wingers. But the rules liberals have established when it comes to so-called offensive remarks are a little different than that. These rules state that once a recognized grievance group decides you've offended them, you have to go through the proscribed steps - backtrack, apologize, reprogram, etc.
There is also this: It's not funny. Colbert's whole act has never really struck me as funny, although maybe I'm at a disadvantage because I know it's all based on stereotypes. But that's the whole thing, right? Colbert's entire show is one big festival of stereotype exploitation against conservatives, some of whom laugh along with the jokes, others of whom just don't watch because it's really not that funny.
Nobody demands he be fired for it because that's not how we roll.
But make one stereotypical remark about a liberal-approved grievance group, and watch what happens.
I'm sure the #CancelColbert campaign is not going to result in the cancellation of Colbert. Comedy Central's entire premise these days seems largely in line with Colbert's thinking, and its audience loves Colbert for that very reason. He's not going anywhere, which I guess is good news for millenials, who prefer getting their "news" from Colbert and Jon Stewart as much as anywhere else.
