If I were to take the advice Stephen Colbert’s offers in his new book I Am America (And So Can You!), I wouldn’t stoop so low as to write about the hilarious and much-needed “Constitution for the Colbert Nation.” I would feel it with my gut.
But like his routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2006, “feeling the truth” just feet away from the president, this much Colbert isn’t for everyone (for example, members of the Bush Administration). Although most of us had seen him on The Daily Show or his own pseudo-pundit show, The Colbert Report, it seemed the event organizers of that evening hadn’t yet tuned in.
After the blistering performance, the video of Colbert praising Bush’s ability to not only stand for things, but also to “stand on things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares” for “the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world” exploded onto the blog scene. Now the speech is available in a different form, as an appendix in I Am America. Finally, the man who coined “truthiness” gives us a reason to get through the 23 1?2 hours a day when he’s not on the air (as he explains on the book jacket).
Colbert put together a collection of his “most-prized knee-jerk reactions” covering subjects ranging from sex & dating (1001 Abstinence Positions) to science (Thanks For the Nukes, Now Go Away) and everything in between.
As he explains right from the start, Colbert is “no fan of books. They’re all fact, no heart.” He’s only writing this one to “impregnate the country with [his] mind,” and so gives us some help in getting through his tirades in the form of stickers to mark passages with phrases like “From the Gut!” or “Tattoo this on Denise!” and Fun Zones with optical illusions such as “Is this Bob Novak Arguing with Paul Begala, or just a very poorly constructed vase?” To mimic his “The Wørd” segment from the Report, Stephen even adds footnotes and makes comments in the margins (for example: “terrible name—never set a date for withdrawal!!!” resides beside a mention of the Hundred Years War.)
Of course, Colbert didn’t write this book on his own, but instead with a team of writers, some of whom worked on The Daily Show’s successful America (the Book). There are diagrams and charts similar to the ones from that faux-textbook included in I Am America, like the Jesus Train Timetable, which makes sure you don’t accidentally get on the Crazy Train, Night Train or Midnight Train to Georgia. The Hollywood chapter slips in a supposedly lost code of ethics for the silver screen, where rule #665 states “If a scene includes a train entering a tunnel, the tunnel shall not be portrayed as enjoying it.”
As nice as it is to have an annotated version of the Correspondent’s Dinner speech, it doesn’t hold the same power as the live version. Seeing the president’s face slowly morph from a “this guy gets me,” to “I think I’m being mocked” was part of the fun. You also need Colbert in person to slip out of character and start cracking up every once in a while when he goes on a ridiculous rant about the war on Christmas, because otherwise it just seems pathetic—you can picture the Ann Coulters of the world saying just the same things. He’s funniest when he’s at his most absurd (“baby carrots are trying to turn me gay!”), and when he takes the cult of personality bit as far as it can go, satirizing the whole process.
All in all, if you’re already a member of the Colbert Nation (and know how to pronounce Colbert correctly) I Am America is worth it even if just for the portraits of Stephen at the beginning of each chapter. At the beginning of “Hollywood,” we see him eating popcorn wide-eyed with a picket sign reading “REPENT!” tossed to the side; the media chapter shows him looking like he’s about to be sick while holding The New York Times at arm’s length. It all just overflows with truthiness.
