Nora Ephron framed the dilemma perfectly when she asked, “Is it possible for a comedian to utterly kill and bomb at the same time?”

To which I say, Absolutely. This was Dylan plugging in at Newport in 1965. The crowd may have booed, but the music world had forever shifted.

(ASIDE: Chris, I know you’ll appreciate the Dylan analogy, having done a whole show of about that moment back in ’01, if I remember correctly.)

Ephron’s got it: he killed and bombed. How is that possible? Then the lightbulb went on:

He was booked to provide comedy. Instead he gave them satire.

As satire it was a work of pure genius — deep cutting, scalpel sharp, with blood everywhere.

As comedy… well, it kinda stunk.

And as for the argument that the press was not laughing because they were being made fun of, Scheiber’s right that the press jokes didn’t come in till halfway through. And one can hear that Cobert got a good enough laugh when told the press they should get on with writing that novel about the reporter who stands up to the White House: “You know, fiction.�

So Scheiber came off as level-headed and honestly observant to me. But Jay Rosen lost me when he did his little impression of Scheiber saying that “nobody who really knooooooows about politics� found the speech funny (which isn’t really what Scheiber said, anyway). That was a sort of grade school moment. He seemed to be attacking Scheiber the person because he didn’t like Scheiber’s argument or even just his sense of humor in this instance. And now Rosen’s posting Scheiber’s errors per word? Twice? Who counts the other guy’s errors per word? It’s like he’s still waiting to be told he’s the smartest kid in the class.

I enjoy the program and will stick with it. Discussions like the Colbert show are great for sparking ideas and criticisms. It’s just what you do with the ideas and information that counts.

Now how do we get the rest of the planet to pay attention???

This morning on Meet the Press I watched the *other* comedian of the event, Steve Bridges, the Bush impressionist. And you know what? He was still pretty funny. And furthermore? A little search through Technorati finds that somebody, somewhere is peeved that Russert skipped mention of Colbert.

Dana Priest, for instance, is under persecution and the threat of prosecution for breaking the sordid tale of secret prisons in Eastern Europe.

The press, I reckon, reports reasonably well – but the voters don’t frickin’ care.

Not really.

We’ve too many goddamned distractions.

How many of us bother to read the various investigative reports in newspapers or magazines?

And when we do, how many of us thereafter organize political dissent?

Top off our inexcusable national somnolence with the sad truth that any given government, or any given corporate cabal puppeteering any given government, in the Two Party State is effectively unaccountable to the People, and you get the degenerating Republic we now enjoy.

The press’s worst failing, I am increasingly coming to comprehend, is its institutional unwilling to speak frankly of the Constitution shackling us to the unresponsive, anti-democratic governmental legacy of a long-gone century.

Unfortunately, this critique applies equally to my favorite media source: ROS.