DVD and Conquer

Paramount Home Video
Available Nov, 6, List Price $19.99

The writers' strike keeps him off the air, and the myopes who run the Democratic Party in South Carolina kept him off the ballot for their suddenly-insignificant Presidential primary. If ever the Colbert Nation needed an injection of vintage news parody, it's now. Serendipity brings this DVD, with more than two hours of highlights from the show's first two years. Revel again in Colbert's nailing of the Bill O'Reilly-like political talk-show host — the paranoid megalomaniac with a bloated ego who thinks everything in the world just spins around him. Or, as Colbert once barked sarcastically at the camera, "I'm just some paranoid megalomaniac with a bloated ego who thinks everything in the world just spins around him! Well, that's the simple answer!"

Most of what you want is here. For familiars I can write in shorthand: The Word! Steagle Colbeagle the Eagle! Green Screen Challenge! Richard Branson! Barry Manilow! Bears! Better Know a District! (Colbert's tangles with D.C. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton remain priceless. And why has the segment been retired, especially after Democratic Caucus chair forbade freshmen Congressmen from appearing in it?) To those who remain in the Colbert-unaware camp, know this: he's not just the most modest guy ever to construct a cult of personality around himself, he deserves a Best Actor Emmy for inhabiting this bizarre fiction so persuasively. His pompous persona is the inside joke everyone gets.

I've been watching television since it and I were pups, and still I say that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report is the smartest, strongest comedy hour (certainly four-times-a-week comedy hour) in TV history. And I'd try to say that even if their politics weren't mine. Aside from the skewering of all those elected and appointed malefactors, the programs' writers are masters of le mot juste, suckers for the joke silly. Remember the segment where Colbert enumerated the portmanteau names for celebrity couples? There were Benifer, Brangelina and, for William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, "Philliam H. Muffman." That'll make me laugh till I die. Even Stephen cracked up when he said it.

ThatÕll make me laugh till I die.

Then again, 30 years ago I thought Johnny Carson's wit was immortal.