Liberal Stephen Colbert Says Conservatives Are Sexist & Racist, But This Is His Writing Staff

by Scott McKay | September 14, 2015 3:31 pm

Do you think Stephen Colbert is a hypocrite?

By now it’s undoubtedly beyond tiresome to hear the entertainment media’s constant refrain about how racist and sexist all the conservatives and Republicans are – we all know that meme is relatively typical fare aimed at discounting ideas in favor of identity, and a lot of us know it’s a classic cultural Marxist tactic.

So when a healthy dose of hypocrisy gets heaped on top, the whole dish is even more appropriately tossed into the garbage. Take Stephen Colbert, for example[1]…

Well, this is sad. Splitsider reports[2] that Stephen Colbert’s new show—the one thatpremiered delightfully[3] earlier this week, the one that seems to be trying to bring a new kind of intellectualism[4] to late-night network comedy—has a writing staff that includes 17 men. And only two women.

And: All 19 of those writers are white.

This is a problem, of course, mostly because of Colbert’s partisan Democrat perspective and constant critique of conservatives as a bunch of rich old white guys out of touch with the new, cool, brown America. In fact, since Colbert is himself a white guy and his writers are writing jokes that a white guy is going to be telling on stage it really isn’t such an awful thing that 17 of his 19 writers are white guys and two of them are white women. He’s going to be doing white-guy material, and there is nothing racist in the assumption that the best writers of white-guy material are likely to be white guys.

But in this idiotic politically-correct world, in which it’s somehow a sin to be a white guy or to act as a white guy, Colbert shouldn’t be immune from the cultural Marxist critique. And that’s why The Atlantic’s Megan Garber is lambasting Colbert for the pallor and testosterone of his writers…

You’d think Colbert would know better than most of his peers that “diversity” is not just some aspirational tautology, but the best proxy we have for ensuring that cultural products that aspire to some kind of mass-ness represent, as best they can, the actual mass. That diversity is—even when it’s kept behind the scenes, even when it’s rumply and sarcastic and sleep-deprived—a signal of the value his show places on differing opinions, and differing experiences, and differing modes of understanding and processing and representing the world.

So. Colbert can pay all the lip service he wants to the cheeky idea that “women should be in charge of everything[5].” He can tell people[6], during the development phases of late-night comedy’s newest entry, that “I’m going to do my best to create a Late Show that not only appeals to women but also celebrates their voices.” He can make a point of having female guests on his show (more, even, than the two who appeared in the first four episodes), and of talking with them about more than their clothes and their boyfriends. (Stephen, if you’re reading: Please definitely do that!) He can reassure himself with all the familiar data about comedy writing skewing male and about late-night comedy writing skewing especially so. (Though it’s worth noting that Amy Schumer, one of Colbert’s two female guests this week, has a writing staff on her show of six women and four men. So.) He can maybe even tell himself that—once he’s proven himself to Les Moonves and Jimmy Fallon and “the nation” and all the other people who are pressure-cooking TheLate Show in its early days—he can bring on more writers, or new writers, and make sure that a decent portion of them are ladies. And not-white!

For the record, the problem with Colbert isn’t that he doesn’t have enough white women, or black guys, or black women, or Chicano transvestites or Hmong genderqueers on his writing staff. The problem is his show is boring. And since most of what he does is insult the half the population which identifies with a conservative worldview, he’s stuck trying to appeal to the other half – and those are the people who do care whether he has Hmong genderqueers writing his jokes.

It would help if Colbert was funnier.