As anyone who’s tuned in over the past two years can attest, The Colbert Report is a sublimely surreal segment of today’s popular culture. While it’s ostensibly a talk show, the Report is equally likely to feature a near-nonsensical political rant, a foreign dignitary visiting for the sake of a single joke or a five-minute animated segment starring Colbert’s pulp sci-fi alter-ego, Tek Jansen. Heck, they even managed to get Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henry Kissinger to arbitrate a rock-off between Colbert and the guitarist for The Decemberists.
When the show is at its peak, Colbert and his writers display an uncanny knack for taking advantage of their medium. Colbert’s tendency to speak directly to his fans (or “heroes” as he calls them), the show’s constant recurring gags, the myriad of contests featuring photo or video editing and the pseudo-mythology being built around the “Colbert” character are all designed to make the show feel interactive. Audiences can actually feel like they’re developing a rapport with the Report in a way that no other show has really offered.
It’s almost inevitable, then, that I Am America (And So Can You!) wouldn’t live up to its source’s standards. How could it? Even at its most conversational (the book was supposedly dictated by Colbert, who doesn’t trust the written word), it’s impossible to give a book the same off-the-cuff feel as a TV show. There are ways around this, of course — just look at Jon Stewart’s America: The Book, that borrowed The Daily Show’s sense of political satire for its textbook parody — but I Am America is essentially an extended monologue from the Report.
Which isn’t to say it’s not funny — it is. The book is structured as a polemic, railing against homosexuality, the media, the elderly and whatever else Colbert decides is the single greatest threat facing America today. Crammed as it is with diagrams (say, a flowchart to determine if someone is gay), photos (of Colbert, all conveniently labelled) and indexes (e.g. “America, see Colbert, Stephen), there’s something to laugh out loud at on every page. Nearly every inch of the book has a joke in it, from the tiny eagles in Colbert’s eyes on the cover to the dust-jacket illustration of an Incredible Hulk-like Colbert stabbing a bear with the American flag (as fans of the show know, Colbert loves America and hates bears). Even the margins feature responses and additions to jokes within the text proper, like the captions during The Word segment on the Report.
But after you’ve read it through once, there’s not much you can do with I Am America. It’s not the type of book you can return to — there’s no great insight or deeper message and no real incentive to dig. While the TV show is almost effortlessly edgy and insightful, I Am America just feels like a joke-book. A well-written joke book, but that’s about it.
