Saturday, January 20, 2007

This just in: Stephen Colbert owns Bill O'Reilly

Just when you thought Stephen Colbert couldn't be more brilliant, you see this:




That's right ... Stephen Colbert being interviewed by Bill-O on the O'Reilly Factor. And the most brilliant part of this is that Stephen does it in character. That is to say: he puts on the persona he plays on The Colbert Report of the irrational right-wingnut modelled explicitly on -- and who pays slavish devotion to -- Bill O'Reilly himself.


Talk about holding a mirror up to nature.


I think what I love most about this is that O'Reilly so obviously wants to nail Colbert as an effete liberal elite, but runs up against his own "interview" tactics at every turn -- and you can see that he's conflicted because Stephen's persona keeps heaping lavish praise on him, and though he knows it's an act, his ego just can't help responding.


I love the fact that both times O'Reilly has taken on Colbert and Jon Stewart on his show, he's run up against a wall. Stewart's interview wasn't funny like Colbert's, but in a lot of ways it was more telling. He played it so cool that O'Reilly had nowhere to go. He kept trying to bait Stewart (try counting just how many times he calls The Daily Show's audience "stoned slackers"), but Stewart never rose to it. O'Reilly kept prodding and prodding, saying ever more ridiculous and absurd things, and Stewart basically gave him just enough rope to hang himself.




And I reiterate:


Get Lewis Black as the press secretary, Rob Cordry as Secretary of Defense and Samantha Bee as Chief of Staff and we're off to the races.

2 comments:

Matthew R. Loney said...

You watch a lot of t.v.

Makes me feel less guilty.

Chris in NF said...

yup. although I do not, at the moment, have cable ... what I do spend way too much time doing lately is finding stuff on YouTube. Like crack, it is.