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Mr. Cohen,
You say you are a funny person. While I have seen no evidence of that in what I have read of your writing, I'll take you at your word. "Being funny," after all, is something of a subjective thing. The same people who find Richard Pryor or George Carlin hilarious probably fail to see the humor in Larry the Cable Guy or Adam Sandler, and vice versa.
As an independent Mark Twain scholar, though, I think I know a little something about American satire; enough to know, anyway, that it isn't always intended to be "funny" in the same way other kinds of humor are meant to be.
If you read Twain's essay "To a Person Sitting in Darkness," for example, you will probably conclude it isn't very funny at all. Twain's invective against US imperialism contradicts the avuncular image of the old man in a white suite spouting folksy aphorisms that we associate with Twain. This essay (and many others he wrote throughout his life) isn't funny but it is damn good satire, the kind of satire that is meant to afflict the comfortable.
However, in 1901 The New York Times in poo-poo'ed the essay much the same manner you critique Colbert's speech. Scolding a reader who wrote in support of "To a Person Sitting in Darkness," the NYT pontificated:
"A man who makes it his vocation to be funny is not called upon late in life to develop a historical conscience."
Knowing what I know of Twain, he didn't make such a distinction between being funny and developing a historical conscience. Based on what I heard in Colbert's speech, I don't think he does either.
It's a pity that critics like yourself do.
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