Absolutely, thanks for that reminder.

From the above-linked piece:

“ Stewart and Colbert, in particular, have assumed the role of secular saints whose nightly shtick restores sanity to a world gone mad.

But their sanctification is not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues. Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.”

Was written 10 years ago.

It’s way worse now.

What a disgrace they bring to a profession that includes such titans as Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, all of whom took great risks in speaking real truth to power, instead of Neoliberal Colbert’s cynical “truthiness.”

technically he is, that may be right, but it feels like a conversation stopper, not a conversation starter

Moral Cowardice distilled