Penn State Professor: Stephen Colbert Enabled Liberals To Feel Patriotic
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Comedy Central's "Colbert Report," hosted by comedian Stephen Colbert, aired its final episode last night, and as is common when something is over or nearing its end, we tend to look back and review the meaningfulness of it all.
Colbert, who is leaving his post to replace David Letterman on CBS's "The Late Show" next year, is known as a satirist of a conservative host.
Sophia McClennen, a Penn State professor on international affairs and author of "Is Satire Saving Our Nation?", talked with WPHT morning host Chris Stigall about the role Colbert filled in our lives.
"Colbert made it possible for people who are on the left to rediscover how to be patriotic. It was a process that had started prior to 9/11, but got very intense shortly after 9/11. It became impossible to disagree with the administration and still feel that you were doing it because you cared about the direction of your country was going in, as opposed to you were not supporting your president. What had happened was that Colbert had taken this hyper-patriotic position, his whole set was so filled with Americana. He was always coming up with these words he called himself -- Lincoln-ish, Mega-American. What [the show] did was really open up an opportunity for us to start to think a little bit more about how did it happen that conservatives had sort of cornered the market on what it meant to be patriotic?"
With the ever growing popularity of shows like "Colbert Report," "The Daily Show" and "Last Week Tonight," the role of comedians as the "scrutinizers of our government" seems to be on the rise, but McClennen feels that most comedians do not want that responsibility.
"I think they don't want to be doing that. I think that they want to be comedians…How did it become their responsibility? There are constantly critiques of their fact checks, their potential partisanship or not, and they're just comedians. They're not supposed to have this kind of control over public discourse. How did that happen?"