Stephen Colbert and the Evolution of Recursive Parody

The Dissent of Man: Stephen Colbert and the Evolution of Recursive Parody Jacob Alfredo Hutchison A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2018 Reading Committee: Odai Johnson, Chair Christine Harold Stefka Mihaylova Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Drama ©Copyright 2018 Jacob Alfredo Hutchison University of Washington Abstract The Dissent of Man: Stephen Colbert and the Evolution of Recursive Parody Jacob Alfredo Hutchison Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Odai Johnson School of Drama The interactive character-driven television performances of late night political parodist Stephen Colbert, and the similarly interactive, similarly character-based performances of alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos have much in common stylistically, but are worlds apart in their goals and effects. Colbert deployed his parodic character to interrogate and reveal the ways those in power use public performance to distract and deceive the citizenry, while Yiannopoulos and others have adopted and adapted Colbert’s tactics, using them to perpetuate those deceptions and to weaken public trust in any political claims. Through an examination of these two figures, this dissertation tracks the evolution of a discursive tactic it terms “recursive parody”: a satire that results from the sustained interactions between a parodic character and a non-fictional person. As a rhetorical and theatrical tool, recursive parody is simultaneously a response to and an accelerant of a widespread social anxiety over the legibility of political intentions. Twenty-first century American citizens, constantly surrounded by performative speech acts, regularly experience this sociopolitical anxiety, which manifests as a grave uncertainty about the reliability of any claimed or perceived intention from any public figure. Consequently, American discursive spheres and publics have become fertile ground for parodies (and other speech acts) that make political intentionality a key part of the performance. This is because both the anxiety and the parody have developed in an environment in which intention is always in question. Ultimately, no matter whether a particular act of recursive parody is meant to illuminate or to obfuscate, the cumulative effect of the form itself is societally destabilizing. Recursive parody responds to uncertainty and instability by replicating them, and can thereby create a negative feedback loop: exacerbating intentionality anxieties, weakening the public trust in discourse, delegitimizing discourse, and eventually eroding the possibility of meaning itself. Acknowledgments I am gratefully indebted to the members of my reading committee, Odai Johnson, Christine Harold, and Stefka Mihaylova, without whose generous guidance and encouragement this project would not have been possible. Working with them has been a great privilege. I also am grateful to all of my colleagues, particularly Jyana Brown, Liz Coen, Jeanmarie Higgins, Sarah Marsh, and Sebastian Trainor. Their camaraderie has been a guiding light throughout the writing process. Without their readiness to read drafts and to discuss arguments, this project would have been greatly impoverished. I would like to acknowledge and thank the faculty and staff of the School of Drama, especially Sue Bruns. Thanks to all my friends and family, and to my parents, Don and Claudia. Above all, my gratitude and love go to Raeanne and to Joris. You are my two favorite people, and it is a joy to have each of you in my life. Raeanne, you amaze me every day and I am excited to see what our future holds. Joris, you are a smart, thoughtful, and kind young man – I am proud of you. This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral, I just happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. – Kurt Vonnegut Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Stephen Colbert’s Game of Truth 47 Chapter Two: Colbert Super PAC 111 Chapter Three: The Unframing of Milo Yiannopoulos 161 Conclusion: Putting the Coarse in Public Discourse 239 Bibliography 251 Introduction He was a larger-than-life figure from a popular television program. Loud and arrogant, he defied convention and categorization, and now he was going to run for president. Or so he claimed, but the truth behind his professed intention was unclear – an uncertainty that sits at the heart of this dissertation. No single explanation for his candidacy seemed adequate. Perhaps his purported presidential aspiration was simply part of his self-promotional media strategy, a temporary posturing designed to further the cultural cachet of his personal brand and on-screen persona and to be discarded immediately once it outlasted its usefulness. One supposed that it was possible that he would actually mount a candidacy to raise awareness of his personal or political agenda, and that once he had gotten sufficient attention his campaign would be suspended and forgotten. Even his most devoted followers could not say for certain. The candidate in question here is Stephen Colbert, a political parodist who attempted to get on the ballot in the 2012 South Carolina Republican Party primary election, but the reader will immediately see the parallels to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016. During his work on The Daily Show (1997- 2005), Stephen Colbert developed his eponymous parodic character: a high-status, poorly-informed, vociferously opinionated conservative political commentator. This persona became the focus of Colbert’s groundbreaking satirical television program The Colbert Report (2005-2014), which he hosted entirely in character. Donald Trump similarly has developed a public persona, partly through having appeared as himself for years on his own television program, The Apprentice. His successful 1 presidential campaign, like Colbert’s parodic one, relied on his flamboyant personality and distinctive performance style. The parallels between Colbert and Trump are not coincidental. As the reader will see, they were both responding to cultural anxieties about intention, albeit in decidedly different ways. This study examines rhetorical tactics that combine parody with the real world, like Colbert’s run for president, arguing that they are simultaneously a response to and an accelerant of the destabilization of interpreting intent in early twenty-first century America. Intentionality Anxiety In this dissertation I argue that American political satirist Stephen Colbert, while performing a parodic character also named Stephen Colbert, uses parodic interactions with real-world people and events to illuminate the many ways that people in power deceive the American public. Colbert’s performances are particularly noteworthy because they help to lessen his audience’s anxiety about the hidden intentions of the political figures that he targets. This is a marked contrast to the effects achieved by other satirists who deploy similar tactics for the opposite purpose: that of perpetuating the invisibility of real political intentions and thereby heightening anxiety about them. There is minimal technical difference in the performances of satire that achieve these dramatically disparate effects. The differences are so slight, in fact, that Colbert himself occasionally accomplishes the opposite of his aim. In this way, Colbert’s style of political parody is simultaneously a response to and a catalyst for the destabilization of the public’s perception of real political intent in American culture. 2 Political parody is one manifestation of an incessant public performance of intention that, along with the threat of terror attacks and the delegitimization of credible political discourse, has created a radical new uncertainty in interpreting intent. This uncertainty, fundamentally different from the inherent unknowability of intent, is fostering a cultural anxiety about intention, which I am calling intentionality anxiety. The uncertainties and anxieties about intention feed back on themselves, not only weakening our trust in discourse, but eroding the possibility of meaning itself. Every public utterance in our hyper-mediated internet-fueled discourse is subject to intense scrutiny, and every individual engaged in discourse, particularly online discourse, is relentlessly bombarded by speech acts of all kinds. The discursive space in which Americans learn about, discuss, and process important issues – that is, our public sphere1 – encompasses a confounding range and quantity of material: news stories, opinion pieces, social media posts, blog entries, celebrity gossip, advertisements, internet comment sections, and other bits of speech and discourse, many of which update in real time, reference one another, and present to the audience a subjective view on objective reality, often while trying to obfuscate their subjectivity. The average American dedicates more mental processing to discerning true versus stated intentions than ever before, simply because we are surrounded by an ever-increasing number of speech acts to interpret. In 2004 science writer Hans Christian von Baeyer argued that humanity and its machine proxies had produced a greater quantity of information during the first three years of 1 As articulated by sociologist Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere is the discursive space where individuals discuss and process the important issues and ideas of the community. It is within this discursive

Load more