The book of Ecclesiastes declares “there is nothing new under the sun.” Ideas and methods are utilized in one generation only to be reappropriated by the next. In the words of Pablo Picasso, “Good artists borrow; great artists steal”. It should therefore come as no surprise that popular satirist Stephen Colbert, a fascinating artist in his own right, has purloined some of his comedic shtick.
Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch Renaissance theologian and humanist, operated early in the 16th century from a perspective much like Colbert’s today. The two men share a bold strand of satirical DNA despite being separated by 500 years. Examining the influence of Erasmus on Colbert will not only determine what the two theologians have in common, but also highlight each man’s contribution to genealogical development of comedy.
Stephen Colbert has described his character on The Colbert Report as a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot”. As is often the case with entertainment media in postmodernity, the boundaries once separating ironic from sincere or authentic from artificial, as well as those terms themselves, have all but dissolved. The salient position celebrities currently occupy in Western culture means that, whether “serious” or not, their messages are heard. By speaking from an explicitly foolish persona, Colbert utilizes this dynamic to mock it.
Stephen Colbert as Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert is a comedian, writer, actor, and satirical television host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. The character Colbert plays on the show, also named Stephen Colbert, is an ostensible right-wing evangelical who was originally featured regularly on John Stewart’s The Daily Show before spinning off to host his own program.
Few modern comics deal with religion from the inside, but the beating heart of Colbert’s character is his real life practice of Roman Catholicism. Funnyman Robin Williams declared Stephen Colbert an “original.” Unlike Jon Stewart’s politically driven The Daily Show, The Colbert Report takes on topics of religion with unmitigated bravado, with cheek, mainly because he knows that of which he speaks.
For example, in February of 2013, Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Wills came on The Colbert Report to discuss his book Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition. The two briefly (but thoroughly) debate the validity of transubstantiation. Wills says it is a “fake”; after pushing back with scriptural and historical references, Colbert cheerfully ends the interview by thanking Wills for coming, then asking, “So, what’s your next stop? The Barnes and Noble in hell?” In this way, Colbert is able to alternately – even simultaneously – argue from spaces of religious fundamentalism and liberal humanism.
Erasmus as Folly
The predominant Christian humanist in the 16th century was a Dutch polymath named Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), whose central work picked up on the traditions of fool literature and of the mock encomium, in which one praised something insignificant, like baldness or theologians. His major work, In Praise of Folly took on all the foolishness of society in general and the church in particular. In fact, before Luther espoused many of his recommendations for reform, Erasmus had denounced fooleries like indulgences (“the crime of false pardons”) and had made light of local utility saints that would find lost items, cure toothaches, or watch over one’s cows and chickens.
In Praise of Folly was written at a holiday stay at the home of his friend Sir Thomas More and dedicated to him. Explaining that kidney trouble kept him ensconced at More’s house, Erasmus tinkered with his Folly as a distraction. As he shared his joke, others encouraged him to expand it; so he played the fool and acted out this comedy from behind the Dame’s mask (much like Socrates had veiled his face in the Phaedrus to praise a non-lover). Erasmus punned on his host’s name. In Latin, Moriae Enconium could be read in praise of folly (as in morons) or in praise of More.
In this classic satire, perhaps the most quintessential of all satirical literature, Erasmus attacked the practice of indulgences with barbs as stinging as anything by Luther. He mocked those mad men who buy tall tales about alleged miracles from pardoners and preachers and ridiculed those who thought to cover their sins with money or escape Judgment by being buried in a monk’s robe.
Particularly gullible were those who would entreat priests to forge pardons for them, forgetting the vice of avarice festering in those who made a profit from the stupid, and that any pardon, much less a specious one, was not worth the paper it was printed on. Folly offered good business sense, previewing P. T. Barnum and W. C. Field’s notion that a sucker was born every minute. Folly’s province, like Barnum’s audience, was the whole human race.
Erasmus’s mouthpiece, Dame Folly, is the embodiment of all that is vacuous, vapid, and vain. Decrying other “wise” philosophers, theologians, and orators, all of whom are secretly indebted to her, she mounts the pulpit and speaks:
And now you shall hear from me a plain extemporaneous speech, but so much the truer. Nor would I have you think it like the rest of orators, made for the ostentation of wit; for these, as you know, when they have been beating their hears some thirty years about an oration and at last produce somewhat that was never their own, shall yet swear they composed it in three days, and that too for diversion: whereas I ever liked it best to speak whatever came out first.
Erasmus wrote many texts, but Moriae Encomium is his legacy. “For only when humor illuminated that mind did it become truly profound. In In Praise of Folly Erasmus gave something that no one else could have given the world.”
Part 2 of this article, “The Colbert Report Is All Folly, Part 2: Well-Intentioned and Poorly Informed,” will post on Wednesday. – Editor