Stephen Colbert and Ali G, problems of famous fake personalities
So Stephen Colbert takes over for David Letterman. My son and I have had a lively text exchange about whether this necessitates Colbert dropping his faux conservative “persona.” We think yes.
The Stephen Colbert Report is a pointedly political satire and his audience is in on the (wink-wink) joke that he’s not really the blustering conservative he pretends to be. But as Letterman’s successor on “The Late Show” Colbert will have to engage people across wide entertainment and “fame” spectrums. Some of them likely wouldn’t be bright enough (or care) about engaging his faux conservative positioning. Thus, he has to drop the act. My guess is he will have to be “himself” and allocate his (liberal) Catholicism to a more Still, it’s a good trick if he call pull it off. He does seem more like an “adult” than Fallon and Kimmel who share a “frat boy” view of the world, ie. everything is funny, isn’t it?
Another famous person who ran into a persona problem was Sacha Baron Cohen. He got famous as Ali G (an irritating mixed race Brit hip hop idiot) whose main gimmick was putting on somewhat famous (and some really famous) people (like Boutros Boutros Ghali and Buzz Aldrin) with dumb questions meant to trip them up. He went on to duplicate his success with Bruno (irritating gay German) and Borat (irritating Kazakhastanian). But once all those characters were “out” in movies of varying success, how can Cohen go back to Ali G? My son postulates that there will still be plenty of people who won’t know Ali G is a false persona and that may or may not be true. I’m sure the comedian is inventive enough to get around that problem or he wouldn’t have Ali G Rezurection slated to return to FXX.
I might even watch one or two.
