A Colbert Christmas – The Greatest Gift Of All! (2008/Comedy Central DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Main Program: C+
Steven
Colbert continues his climb as the funniest, wittiest and most outright
satirical figure on TV today, now a rarity in a TV (and now digital and HD
landscape) that has become the wasteland it was once wrongly accused of
being. As if to emulate Bing Crosby or
Andy Williams, as if they were fans of The Sex Pistols whose Egg Nog was spiked
with crystal meth (or something like it) comes A Colbert Christmas (2008).
This darkly humorous send-up of classic Christmas specials is also an
annihilation of the last few generations of bad ones since the 1980s.
You know
you’re in for it when the front cover looks like a Christmas album Williams or
Crosby would have released and the back portrays Colbert and guest stars Elvis
Costello, Jon Stewart, John Legend, Willie Nelson, Feist and Toby Keith as
characters in A Charlie Brown Christmas! Running 43 minutes (i.e., for an hour-long TV
slot) the show has several music numbers starting with a song and dance by
Colbert and sudden singing by all the other guests, including Keith singing the
kind of intolerant Christmas song about the current fantasy “plot against
Christmas” only Aryan Nation could appreciate (beheading “liberals” for
defending the separation of church and state, setting of nuclear blasts if
mangers are not on state property, etc.) though the video footage is darkly
humorous at times.
With so
many of those older specials lost to time (and not on DVD) the show constantly
hits a bull’s eye on how plastic and phony those “false warmth” shows could
be. This was even a cycle and
ironically, only the Charlie Brown special has endured (see our DVD review
elsewhere on this site) only because it is animated, a masterpiece and the
characters are fictitious.
All in
all, it is worth your time, and to complete the joke, you can watch it with or
without an audience response/laugh track.
Let’s hope like Charlie Brown, Colbert gets to do specials for every
holiday out there!
The 1.33
x 1 image was taped in the tradition of many of the live-looking specials it
spoofs and looks good for that, down to colorful sets that are fun, funny and
phony. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
throughout the extras and two tracks for the main program are clean and
competent. Extras include another nod to
holiday silliness, the idea of a picture of a fireplace running on your TV in
place of a real one. However, this one
has burning books! You also get three
alternate endings, Colbert singing Cold,
Cold Christmas and a video advent calendar (video clips you can access by
clicking onto what look like paper perforations over those dates to reveal
something hidden, yet another clever touch) adding up to more laughs.
- Nicholas Sheffo
