World News Korner

Stephen Colbert responds to the #CancelColbert controversy. And even makes it entertaining.

Courtesy of Salon:

Stephen Colbert is dealing with the fallout from a tweet sent out on his show’s behalf — and doing so on-air by imagining his show really getting cancelled.

Last week, the Twitter feed @ColbertReport, affiliated with the Comedy Central series, tweeted an out-of-context joke from a segment mocking the Washington Redskins’ owner and his attempts to reach out to the Native American community without changing his team’s offensive name. The #CancelColbert hashtag immediately caught fire, and Colbert opened his show by depicting the studio shutting down… his writers walking out dejected… Manhattan freezing over… the famous 1970s-ad Native American shedding a single tear… all manner of dystopia.

The actor B. D. Wong, himself Asian, appeared as a therapist of sorts to explain to Colbert, dressed in Redskins regalia and lying on a couch, that he was having a horrible dream. “This is still ‘The Colbert Report,’” Colbert announced.

It was, all in all, a pretty audacious gambit — to openly mock those who’d sought to get Colbert fired by rubbing in their face that it’d never happen, and to bring in one of America’s most prominent actors of Asian extraction to aid in a non-apology. In his opening monologue, following an audience chant (“Ste-phen! Ste-phen!”) Colbert joked about how offensive it was that his shoes were made in Vietnam (rather than in China) and how upset he was that iPhone’s emojis are growing more diverse thanks to the “P.C. police.”

And, yes, Colbert directly addressed the controversy: In a segment called “Who’s Attacking Me Now,” Colbert joked that “we almost lost” and then went through just how the controversy went down, through a sort of mirror-world reality whereby “Colbert,” the conservative on-air persona, saw his attempts to support his fictitious and racist alter ego get misinterpreted online.

I was hoping that Colbert would take this and run with it, and he did it spectacularly.

He managed to take advantage of the "controversy" to continue to point out the hypocrisy of going after him and leaving the Redskin's new "out reach" to the native American community virtually untouched.

If you did not see the show last night I highly suggest that you click the links provided above and enjoy seeing the master at work.

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