Colbert Report

Steven Colbert’s suggestion that Donald Trump’s mouth is suitable only to be “Valdimir Putin’s cock holster” (above video, about 11:30 in) has drawn a great deal of comment, both on its implications for free speech and how the issue (and coverage of it) have been manipulated by different political factions. Two issues which underlie a lot of the debate have not drawn such attention: whether his joke was in fact homophobic, and how an answer to that first question is best decided.

I doubt if Colbert himself is a homophobe, or if he intended to denigrate anyone but Trump when he told this joke. Nevertheless, it is understandable that he has drawn criticism, whatever the motivations of some of his critics. At the very least, he and his writers were very careless in letting this joke through.

The joke is making a point about Trump (that he is subservient to Putin) by assigning him a fictional sexual relationship with Putin. The conceit of the joke is that the fictional sexual relationship is a grossly exaggerated version of Trump’s perceived relation with Putin. In order to grasp that conceit, one must assume, at least for the purposes of the joke, that engaging in this kind of sexual relationship (i.e., performing fellatio on someone else) is grossly subservient behaviour.

This trope about gay men (and heterosexual women) has a long and disreputable history. If a similar joke had been told about a gay man, say Milo Yiannopoulos, I take it that it would have been obviously homophobic; likewise if it had been told about Hilary Clinton. In each case, the joke would have worked by presenting a stereotyped characterisation of the target’s sexuality which many people – rightly, I think – would find offensive.

It might be thought that a relevant difference is that Trump is not actually gay. This matters insofar as Trump himself could not claim to be have been the victim of a certain stereotype; rather, he was the target of a joke which made use of this stereotype. But that is the point: that the joke employed the stereotype meant that gay men were, so to speak, collateral damage.

There is another aspect to this debate which potentially has much father-reaching implications. I am not gay, but I can give my opinion on whether or not Colbert’s joke was homophobic. But is it not up to gay men (and perhaps women) to decide whether or not this joke is genuinely offensive? If a number of gay men were to say that they weren’t offended by the joke, or that no harm was done in any case, who am I to disagree?

One reason to take what they say seriously is that they are presumably better placed than me to know what gay men in general would think about this issue. Better placed, but not necessarily right; after all, it seems that different gay men had different views on the joke (as, for instance, Steven Thrasher acknowledged in his article). I am Irish, but I wouldn’t presume to know what all Irish people, or even the majority, felt about a certain joke simply because of my nationality.

There is something clearly amiss with a person who is not a member of a certain community presuming to know when members of that community should be offended, regardless of what they actually feel. In recent years we have become much more sensitive as a society to the importance of different social and culture perspectives when it comes to deciding what is or is not offensive. But there should also be a place for critical reflection from one’s own perspective, informed by views from other perspectives but not wholly dependent on them.

The Good, The Bad and the Smugly

Caitlin Flanagan’s piece in The Atlantic is the latest in a long line of articles berating American liberals for their condescending attitude towards their more conservative fellow citizens, and suggesting that this attitude may have contributed to the coronation of President Trump. A thread running through these articles has been the role of satire, and in particular the late-night talk-show monologues of John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah et al. As Emmett Rensin put it in a widely-discussed piece from last year,

Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style [of American liberals]. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid.

He also correctly predicted the wages of this style:

Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the fuck happened?

Quite.

There are points in both Rensin and Flanagan’s pieces with which one could take issue. For instance, one could certainly question whether, as Flanagan suggests, the late-night hosts decided en masse during the election to criticise not just Trump and his retinue, but anyone considering voting for him. But it is hard to deny the thought that for someone inclined to support Trump, it was reasonable to feel that their views were being dismissed; or that the perceived smugness of late-night comics and their liberal fans provides a convenient way of capturing the liberal media and the whole liberal elite’s disdain, as more conservative Americans see it, for Trump and his supporters.

Smugness is a term which is hard to pin down, but which feels right in certain circumstances – and as someone who watches a fair bit of these late-night comics, I have to say that they often do come across as smug. This is not so much a matter of what they say but as how it is said: it is a question of tone, a sense of being overly satisfied with one’s own correctness and of talking down to those who might disagree.[i] Flanagan picks out the following clip from John Oliver as epitomising this:

When John Oliver told viewers that if they opposed abortion they had to change the channel until the last minute of the program, when they would be shown “an adorable bucket of sloths,” he perfectly encapsulated the tone of these shows: one imbued with the conviction that they and their fans are intellectually and morally superior to those who espouse any of the beliefs of the political right.[ii]

Something which has not been much discussed in many of these articles is the possibility that a certain format may contribute towards the sense of smugness. All of the shows that Flanagan mentions involve their hosts performing straight-to-camera monologues. Their styles vary (Samantha Bee often comes across as irritated, verging on furious; Stephen Colbert as trying to be suavely above it all; Seth Meyers as a little goofy) but in each case the set-up involves the host assuming a position of authority. They know what’s going on, they use this knowledge to expose the stupidity, ignorance or hypocrisy of others (preferably Republican others), and they invite you to follow their direction in laughing at the target. This is not a format which tends to convey much self-doubt, even if the host acknowledges that a particular issue is complicated or that different viewpoints are legitimate; by acknowledging this, they are often implicitly contrasting their open-mindedness with the dogmatism of others.

Of course, any form of satire will involve poking fun at a target, and will implicitly set up the satirist (and the audience) as above the butt of the joke. But not all satire conveys a sense of superiority, even if it is predicated on it. For instance, Stephen Colbert rose to fame playing right-wing wing-nut ‘Stephen Colbert’, delivering straight-to-camera monologues eviscerating spineless liberals, while of course really sending up the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Insofar as Colbert’s persona was modelled on right-wing talk-show hosts and commentators, he was implicitly claiming superiority over them in order to heap scorn upon them. But this sense of superiority isn’t manifest in his performance.

This may be as simple a matter as Colbert’s not talking down to his targets, but rather enacting their hot air-fuelled rhetorical flourishes. The joke is still at their expense, but it’s not spelled out. Colbert, in his old persona, showed the ridiculousness of right-wing blow-hards rather than stating it. In contrast, a format in which the comedian is constantly telling the audience just how wrong-headed certain people are can hardly help being smug, whatever political stance the comedian is adopting.

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[i] Rensin subsequently pointed out that he was not so much concerned with liberal smugness as with what he termed the ‘Smug Style. This phrase is somewhat misleading: as Rensin defines it, the Smug Style is not really a style but a set of beliefs about politics, liberals and conservatives. In any case, what I am more interested in is what is properly termed ‘style’, a style of comedy which conveys a sense of smugness. This style may in part be rooted in the beliefs which Rensin identifies, but it is not a matter of having those beliefs but rather of how they are conveyed.

[ii] Actually, I found this example unconvincing. Oliver’s segment on abortion is predicated on the assumption that abortion is a legitimate option for a pregnant woman, at least in some circumstances. The people he was advising to switch over were those opposed to allowing abortion in any circumstances whatsoever. Given the particularly divisive nature of this issue, it is hardly the epitome of liberal smugness to suggest that those holding such a view would get little of value out of what was to follow.