Hockey Puck

I never really liked Don Rickles. While he could be funny at times, especially in very short, small doses, in the end he always seemed somehow just plain mean. A small, nasty man using insults to get laughs. His act seemed to boil down to one thing, "Hockey puck!". He'd use the term over and over, insulting whoever was the target of his spiel. Funny once, maybe, but used repeatedly it became stale and very old, very quickly. One thing I noticed when I saw him on television shows where he did his act in front of a live audience, the laughter was different for him. Not as hearty as it was for other comedians, it had a strained, almost embarrassed quality to it.

I see today that the blogosphere is pretty much all Colbert, all the time. The left, of course, praising him and cursing the press. The right slamming him and his act. I wouldn't know Colbert if I tripped over him. I'm just not a television kind of guy most of the time. But I did watch the video of the act he put on at the Press Club dinner last night. And you know what? He did not get many laughs. At all. Aside from a few jokes that drew genuine laughter from the crowd, most of the other times, if he did not get complete silence (quite often, really) he got that same strained, embarrassed laughter I remember from Rickles appearances.

Because in the end, his appearance boiled down to one thing.

Hockey puck.

UPDATE: Brainster has a great take on this.

UPDATE: New Republic's The Plank has a straight up take on the Colbert performance. From someone who is not a Bush fan or a war supporter. The judgment: Colbert wasn't funny. No internet conspiracies, nor press corp cover-up. Colbert just sucked. He wasn't edgy or brave, he was boring, banal and not funny.

UPDATE: I think the Washington Post gets it, too. Of course, consensus among most of the left is the same old "we're being silenced" meme. Which they talk about endlessly. Go figure.