This article explains it better than I can...

ABOUT SATURDAY NIGHT...:

I'm a big Stephen Colbert fan, a huge Bush detractor, and I think the White House press corps has been out to lunch for much of the last five years. (Though, unlike many in the blogosphere, I don't think that's because White House reporters are lazy or stupid.) That should have made me the ideal audience-member for Colbert's performance at this weekend's White House Correspondents' Dinner (WHCD). As it happens, though, I laughed out loud maybe twice during Colbert's entire 20-odd minute routine. Colbert's problem, blogosphere conspiracy theories notwithstanding, is that he just wasn't very entertaining. Most of the funny lines had been recycled from his show; the new material was all pretty tired--including a way-too-long video presentation whose big joke was that ... Helen Thomas is old and batty. (Stop me if you've heard that one.)

Various aggrieved bloggers have suggested the audience wasn't laughing because Colbert was too tough on the president and the press corps. I dunno. I didn't find Colbert appreciably harder on either of them than, say, Jay Leno was two years ago--though Leno did take shots at John Kerry, too, which maybe took some of his edge off. In any case, it wasn't just journalists who didn't find Colbert amusing. I was sitting about ten feet from Ed Helms, Colbert's former "Daily Show" colleague, and kept glancing over to check his reaction. He cracked some smiles here and there. But I never saw him doubled over with laughter, not even close. My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left--until recently more common on the right--wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value. Jon Stewart often says he hates when his audience cheers; he wants them to laugh. My sense is that, had most of the bloggers complaining about the WHCD been around Saturday night, there would have been lots of cheering but not much more laughing.

--Noam Scheiber

UPDATE: As if to prove my point, Atrios chides me for misunderstanding the Helen Thomas video. I'm guessing he thought the video was funny because Thomas has been one of the White House press corps' most outspoken war skeptics (and therefore a hero to antiwar bloggers). Watching the White House press secretary (played by Colbert) run away from her must have had him in stitches. But to the extent that the routine works as comedy rather than agitprop--and for the sake of argument let's say it works as comedy--it's because Thomas is, indeed, old and batty. Try imagining the same sketch with, say, Katrina Vanden Heuvel in the stalker role and you see what I mean.

Also, before you write in complaining that I'm a war-mongering Bush apologist because I don't think Helen Thomas is some kind of hero, please note that I also thought the Iraq war was a bad idea from the get-go.