Well, I guess he could plausibly be called the first tabloid President, in the sense of facts being secondary to a big-print splashy headline, glurge mattering more than reason, outrage mattering more than compromise. The Macedonians were just doing the online equivalent of the National Enquirer, with even fewer standards.
That is to say, no standards at all. And it worked, as far as they were concerned.
One of the pilots I flew with while I was in Iraq in, I think 2007, loved Colbert because “Colbert gives it to those liberals.”
No, we don’t. Liberals just like to convince themselves that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot.
I can vaguely picture somebody thinking Colbert was serious if they’d only ever seen a few minutes of one episode, but any regular viewer would have to eventually notice the audience was laughing more than cheering.
Any chance a deaf conservative who only read the closed-captioning might be fooled?
Which is one of the pitfalls of satire – for it to work, the audience has to perceive how some flaw in their assumed truths is being depicted ironically, and say to themselves “Damn, is that me? Am I missing that?”. If OTOH all they perceive is “huhuhuhuh, they dumb” mockery, you get nowhere. And the latter can happen either because they are in fact being mocked, or because the satire’s going over their heads. (And their being whooshed does NOT mean they’re dumb: it means you were not targeting them, but they still heard you.)
They let a dumb guy fly an expensive airplane?
Hey, don’t knock apes! They beat us humans in the race to space!
Yeah, but they don’t believe Colbert is serious.
On edit, I was thinking that the Russians sent a dog to orbit and electrocuted her rather than bring her back. I wonder if the monkeys knew that when they threw fecal matter at the guys who recovered them.
The point (as I understood it) is that liberals can enjoy Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin thinking “the real Sarah Palin is so stupid!” and conservatives can enjoy it thinking “this impersonation of Sarah Palin is so stupid!”. And then Gladwell goes on to imply that this means that Tina Fey (assuming she’s a liberal) is a bad person and an ideological traitor because “real” satire should be painful and insulting to conservatives and anything less is worse than useless.
I disagree with his point: for me, the most important thing for a joke is for it to be funny and everything else is secondary.
And a mean-spirited intent to deliberately offend and hurt most often ends up being not funny even for those who agree with you.
Speaking as one, no we don’t.
I recently had a conversation with a Trump-supporting friend in which I discovered he believed the SNL skit with Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle (in which the pair were laughing at some white Clinton supporters as they (the white people) watched the Trump election results coming in) was making a pro-Trump point, and that the two black characters were happy Trump was winning, and were making fun of the Liberals for assuming Trump and his followers were racist.
So yeah, I believe people thought Colbert was being serious.
I don’t buy Gladwell’s suggestion that this shows Colbert was a “comic genius” who knew how to create “comedy that appeals to both sides,” and I don’t buy the suggestion that this is some kind of cognitive bias. Rather, I think it’s just ignorance. Many conservative viewers are ignorant of the context, and do not understand some things about how jokes actually work (seriously, see conservative’s best attempts at satire and you’ll know what I mean), and so literally don’t get the joke, while liberals do. It’s not best described as a symmetric cognitive bias. It’s an assymetric cognitive deficit.
On the other hand, I do agree that, given this reality, it makes sense to do research into the actual real world effects of this kind of satire and adjust strategies accordingly.
To be fair, sometimes he was. Anyone who thought that Mike was the hero of All in the Family was just as delusional as those who think Archie was. Mike was not the intelligent voice of reason on the show. Edith was.
I used to work with an old guy who took Archie Bunker seriously and agreed with every word he said. He couldn’t understand why everyone thought Bunker was funny.
Back when he first made the scene, Rush Limbaugh was actually clever and funny in satirizing liberals. Nowadays, he takes himself way too seriously, but believe it or not, he used to be on John Stewart’s level.
He had the Politically Correct Christmas commercial with the background of a chorus of finger-wagging liberal censors gently chiding the announcer until he rephrased “Have a Merry Christmas” as “Have a Merry Paradigm of Celebratory Vernal Equinox Observation Integrating Polytheistic Concepts.” He had Caller Abortions, where he would play a vacuum cleaner sound effect whenever he dropped a caller.
Mike was an asshole, that was very clear. He was a loud, obnoxious moocher and for all his alleged progressive views was a huge sexist pig. The characters were human, warts and all.
But yeah, a lot of people agreed with Archie.
There isn’t any, though someone in the future may link to this as evidence people once thought Malcolm Gladwell was an actual journalist.
I think that half the White House staff thought this way back when they invited Steven to host the Press Corp dinner and he tore Bush II a new one on live TV.
My brother thought he was a real conservative at one point, probably fairly early but definitely not in the beginning. I remember he told me I should check him out and I already knew who he was and that he was playing a character.
My brother has a PhD in American history, a Master’s in education, and he’s above average when it comes to intelligence. And he’s a conservative Republican. Not a religious conservative, FTR.
*Or maybe the PhD is in Education/ Masters in History. I’m a dumb drop-out so I forget these things.
I can speak to both ends. My uber-Conservative mother refused to watch a millisecond of Colbert because she took it seriously. I tried explaining it, and it was a massive fail, she was unmoved. 
BUT, I also have a college-educated co-worker who is a solid life-long Democrat, and he refused to watch it as well, saying he couldn’t figure out if it was serious or not.:smack: I told him it wasn’t serious. He was still dubious…
I have learned you can’t explain satire, parody, and irony to people who don’t understand it. And it is a shame, because they are missing out on the best forms of humor, and this line of thinking has sucked all the fun out of Halloween, too. What’s funnier than dressing up as the opposite of what you are? We had a church comedy revue pageant when I was a kid in the 70s, and our preacher dressed up as the devil, and it was a hoot! Everyone thought it was the funniest thing, everyone got the joke, and exactly ZERO people were offended. We also used to have “Womanless Weddings” where some little pipsqueak guy would be the groom and some big hulking burly type would be the bride, and the men would ham it up, and people laughed themselves silly! Yeah, that wouldn’t fly today, would it?
That’s why either people get Monty Python or they don’t. I have given up trying to explain Monty Python to people who don’t get it, and are never going to get it. Anyone who proclaims that “Monty Python isn’t funny” is going to get a throat-slashing side eye from me, and I am going to immediately think less of you…it’s my social barometer, what can I say?
There are a lot of things I am sad to see go away from modern American life in this big brain drain, and satire is definitely one of them!