Colbert for President: A Run or a Comedy Riff?

When Stephen Colbert announced he was exploring a run for president of the United States — or rather, president of "the United States of South Carolina" — the announcement was simultaneously a joke, a media event, a campaign finance experiment, and a piece of political commentary sharper than most actual political commentary.

Colbert, in character as the pompous right-wing pundit he had portrayed on The Colbert Report for years, filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, established a Super PAC, and turned over control of that Super PAC to his friend and colleague Jon Stewart — demonstrating, in real time and with real money, how Super PACs could be used to funnel unlimited outside money into campaigns while maintaining legal separation from the candidates they supported.

The Super PAC portion of the exercise was not satire in any conventional sense: it was an actual legal entity that actually raised money and actually ran actual advertisements. The absurdity of the legal framework Colbert was exposing was the point. By doing the thing he was lampooning, he made the lampooning impossible to dismiss.

The polling, briefly, showed Colbert ahead of some actual candidates in South Carolina — a data point that provoked both laughter and unease, depending on one's view of the actual candidates.

The Colbert presidential exploration occupied a peculiar space that only a handful of performers have ever inhabited: the place where comedy becomes so precisely aimed at its target that it stops being purely comedy. Jon Stewart and Colbert, at their best, were doing something that looked like entertainment but functioned as political education.

Whether it changed anything is a different question.

Sources

• Stephen Colbert 2012 presidential campaign — Wikipedia
• Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow — Wikipedia