In my house, we get basic cable, so we haven't seen too much of Stephen
Colbert, whose show has been consistently praised as one of the funniest
on television. With all the good buzz, when I heard that Colbert would
have a Christmas special, I was intrigued, and my curiosity turned to
anticipation when I realized that the special would be released on DVD.
It took me much longer to get it than I expected, owing to a lengthy
wait at Netflix, but I finally got to watch A Colbert Christmas, and I got just about exactly what I expected: 45 minutes of clever but irreverent songs and dialogue exchanges.
A Colbert Christmas
finds Colbert trapped in his cabin in the mountains at the very time
when he's supposed to be in New York City filming his extravagant
Christmas special. While Elvis Costello fills him in by phone on the
exciting goings-on there - The Nutcracker! Jonas Brothers! Goats posing as reindeer! - Colbert, dressed in a snazzy red cardigan and looking for all the world like Full House's
Danny Tanner, welcomes a series of surprise guests to his cabin, all
the while refusing to leave for fear of the bear lurking nearby.
Colbert's special guests include Toby Keith, Willie Nelson, Jon
Stewart, John Legend and Feist, along with George Wendt in a Santa suit.
It's impossible to forget that this was a television special, since
each segment concludes with a cheesy graphic in which a wreath frames a
picture of the most recent guest. With the exception of Santa, each of
the guests gets either a solo or a duet.
Feist, portraying an angel, has Please Be Patient, the prettiest of these songs, a parody of Angels We Have Heard on High which imagines angels as operators of an extremely backed up phone system. Willie Nelson's Little Dealer Boy, largely inspired by the Little Drummer Boy
duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie, is sweetly melodic as well,
but its lyrics, about a fourth wise man offering some suspiciously
aromatic vegetation, are bound to raise a few eyebrows.
Of the songs presented, my least favorite is probably Nutmeg, Legend's seductive little number, which is laced with double entendres worthy of Austin Powers, while There Are Much Worse Things to Believe In, Colbert's concluding duet with Costello, borders on being genuinely touching. So does Hanukkah,
in which Jon Stewart stops by to ask Colbert if he'd consider
celebrating the Jewish holiday since the host fears Christmas has been
ruined. Stewart, who doesn't have much of a singing voice, comes off as a
bit of a drip and doesn't bring to Hanukkah nearly the same excitement
Colbert brings to Christmas. ("COLBERT: Does Hanukkah commemorate events
profound and holy? A king who came to save the world? STEWART: No, oil
that burned quite slowly.") Nonetheless, it's a fairly sweet and
educational exchange.
The most heavily advertised segment is Toby Keith's, in which he declares war on the war on Christmas. On the one hand, Have I Got a Present for You
is pretty distasteful, as it seems to portray Christians as bunch of
bloodthirsty vigilantes. On the other hand, as a parody of Keith's own The Angry American,
my least favorite song that hit the airwaves in response to September
11th, it's just about perfect, so I tend to think of it more as
self-parody than anything else when he growls, "Separate church and
state, that’s what some lawyer said. I say it’s time we separated him
from his head." (For the record, I like the idea put forth by a local
radio station that Christians construct visible-from-the-street nativity
scenes in our own yards, thus making a peaceful public statement about
the reason for the season. And Colbert's suggestion, hidden in one of
the boxes in the Countdown to Christmas special feature, of saying
"Merry Christmas" to clerks before they can say "Happy Holidays" isn't
bad either, so long as you don't replicate the Clint Eastwood stare he
brings with it.)
Colbert does have a couple of songs to himself. There's the peppy opening number, Another Christmas Song, which is about as vacuous as Happy Holiday, whose chorus gets me cringing every time I hear it, and Jingle Man, Christmas Boy, a nonsensical Jingle Bells
parody of which you only get a snippet in the special itself. For the
whole thing, you'll have to check out day 20 on the Countdown to
Christmas. That's the only box in the virtual advent calendar whose
video clip is more than a minute long; the rest come in at under 30
seconds. The funniest of his solo songs is Cold, Cold Christmas,
which is a stand-alone bonus feature in which Colbert, dressed as a
cowboy and strumming a guitar, drops an avalanche of snow-related
metaphors as he croons a mournful ditty about a bad breakup. (Another
fun bonus feature is a crackling Yule log you can leave on the screen
for a few minutes if you're inclined to pretend you have a fireplace.)
The special's production values are astonishingly hokey, which appears
to have been entirely intentional. The bear threatening Colbert is some
guy in a silly-looking bear suit, except in the one scene in which it's a
video clip of an actual bear. Every new guest is accompanied by the
same short burst of wild applause. Several songs have a
headache-inducing parade of video clips behind them; the worst offender
is Have I Got a Present for You, which incorporates several
obscure old Christmas specials and lots of corny graphics in rapid
succession, not to mention the way Keith bounces around the screen,
sometimes in a different costume than a moment before. The special also
takes the opportunity to spoof It's a Wonderful Life, and there's an eye-rolling running joke involving a sprig of mistletoe.
This is not a special for children, and many adults will find it too
irreverent to enjoy. Once is certainly enough for me. However, I have to
give props to Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the most excellent songs for That Thing You Do! and Music and Lyrics, and David Javerbaum. They are responsible for all the songs here except the group rendition of What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?
I'm such a sucker for novelty songs, and these are both well-written
and, surprisingly, lacking in profanity, though some of them belong on
the naughty list anyway. This is a special that simultaneously mocks and
celebrates, though much of the mocking is more about individual
personalities (Legend's luck with the ladies, Nelson's history with
marijuana) than Christmas in general. Still, in the end, it's hard to
tell which wins out, so I'm inclined to caution Christians, and maybe
also Jews, who are serious about their faith to tread carefully. Those
songs sure are catchy, and they're probably not the sort you want
running through your head all week.
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