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Abstract
This essay analyzes Stephen Colbert’s 2012 “out-of-the-box” prank in which he created and operated a legally recognized Super PAC during the 2012 election cycle. Contextualized by the Supreme and District Courts’ decisions to allow unlimited contributions to Super PACs from corporate entities, Colbert’s prank took advantage of a loophole in campaign finance law to extend his character’s parody into the most sacred realm of American politics—the elections themselves. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s notion of the comic frame and rhetorical conceptualizations of citizenship, I argue that Colbert’s Super PAC antics permitted his character to perform citizenship. The resulting performance constitutes a model, the citizen-fool, as a potential comic corrective for overly tragic manifestations of democratic political culture.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Jeffrey Jones’s Entertaining Politics, Geoffrey Baym’s From Cronkite to Colbert, Amber Day’s Satire and Dissent, Sophia McClennan’s Colbert’s America, Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris’s Laughing Matters, and Amarnath Amarasingam’s The Stewart/Colbert Effect.
2. Although I use the word prank in its vernacular meaning throughout this essay, an argument could be made (quite convincingly, I think) that Colbert’s Super PAC was a prank in the theoretical sense posed separately by Christine Harold and Kembrew McLeod since it was at once disruptive, provocative, and educational.
3. Burke identifies a third frame of acceptance, the epic, but abandons his discussion of its characteristics a few keystrokes after first mentioning it. The literature on Burke’s poetic frames has acted in kind.
4. The process of division and elimination is often referred to as scapegoating or victimage.
5. In fact, Burke was no proponent of humor, which he saw as a kind of inversion of tragedy that reduces or “dwarfs” a situation rather than amplifying it (Burke, Attitudes 43). Comedy, by contrast, sees a situation as neither more nor less than what it is.
6. The Greek word for democracy, demokratia, is commonly interpreted as a combination of the words demos, which means citizenry, and kratos, power.
7. There is a different word for the people in Greek, hoi polloi, because demos implies more than people. Demos required its subject to be an Athenian male property owner. Even though we regularly translate demos to mean “the people” in contemporary discourse these translations are rhetorically misleading.
8. On this point, Asen’s position is similar to Robert Hariman’s in “Parody and Public Culture.”
9. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Super PACs are “independent expenditure-only committees” that “may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates.”
10. The National Rifle Association, for example, is a “social welfare” organization.
11. According to the FEC website, an applicant must submit a “Statement of Organization” form within ten days of raising or spending $1,000 in connection to a federal elections and receive FEC approval. That’s it. Of course, I did not understand the process before writing this piece so, in this regard, I too am a fool in our political drama.
12. It is impossible to tell how Colbert’s intervention affected the results because votes for the fictional candidate Parry were credited to the actual candidate Perry.
13. This real/absurd juxtaposition is something of a trend in Colbert’s rhetoric specifically, and satirical and ironic rhetoric more generally. Lisa Flores, for instance, argues that the Take Our Jobs campaign—in which Colbert participated—utilized the juxtaposition between reality and absurdity to create a space to reimagine migrant labor and immigration.
14. He was actually barred from joining the campaign so late in the season, so he ran under the name of former candidate Herman Cain who had by that time suspended his campaign.
15. Potter is a former commissioner and chair of the FEC and served as General Counsel for the McCain campaigns in 2000 and 2008.
16. It’s hard not to agree with Stewart as he exclaims, “I still can’t believe that’s legal!”
17. Colbert elaborated on this point in an exchange with Ted Koppel on the newsmagazine program Rock Center, noting that the FEC is a 3-3 organization and therefore likely to split their votes when deciding whether or not to fine a Super PAC. The consequences of violating coordination and disclosure laws, though theoretically clear, are moot in practice.
18. Even worse, Winning Our Future, a Super PAC that supported Newt Gingrich’s primary campaign, raised 20 of its 23 million dollars from just one couple, Casino magnates Miriam and Sheldon Adelson.
19. In fact, of the $1.2 million raised and spent by ABTT only about twenty thousand dollars (1.66%) came from the four donations of more than one thousand dollars. More information on Super PAC donations can be found at www.opensecrets.org.
