A Colbert Christmas: There are much worse things to believe in
Today we move on to an entirely different type of Christmas special – the celebrity-hosted, musical variety number. This is a type of television laden with nostalgia and history. Celebrities have done holiday specials for a very long time, but the variety show format has largely died out of our cultural consciousness due to its overwhelming uncoolness. Now, we only like our song and dance if it’s accompanied by a gossipy, dramatic competition or embedded in a snarky, self-aware dramedy.
From that perspective, A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All is a bit of an oddball in the modern television landscape. Its basic structure, where a famous host moves through a hokey Christmas narrative while celebrity guests drop in to blather cheerily and sing a song, is a winking throwback to heart-warming television from days of yore. In this sense, however, A Colbert Christmas is a nice example of form meeting function. Stephen Colbert’s on-air persona is all about laughing at the disconnect between his words and his actual meaning, and his satire of stereotypical conservative television anchors frequently includes their obsessions with holiday tradition and the values and morals of an earlier era. Of course Stephen would chose a variety show for his Christmas special – it’s self-aggrandizing, moralizing, and uber-traditional to the point of being passé.
In this vein of meta self-aware mockery, A Colbert Christmas follows Stephen as he gets snowed into his cabin and is unable to travel to New York to tape his show’s Christmas special. Dejected, he worries about how to celebrate Christmas, questions his faith, and is joined by several celebrity friends. Jon Stewart stops in to sing about Hanukkah, which Stephen quickly rejects as a viable holiday, the angel on Stephen’s crèche turns into Willie Nelson, who sings about Christmas spirit and marijuana, and John Legend drops by as a park ranger, where he and Stephen sing a song about nutmeg that will make you blush. Feist also makes an appearance as a disinterested angel customer service representative, and Elvis Costello comes in at the end to tie everything together.
The whole special is one giant post-modern joke on Christmas politics and the American consumerist holiday, replete with self-reference and sarcasm. The songs, while sung by talented, enthusiastic artists, are all about undercutting the sincerity of the season. After all, how many programs can you think of where Santa arrives with a DVD of the very Christmas special you are presently watching, proving it to be as its subtitle claims, “The Greatest Gift of All”? Right before you come away from the hour feeling like Christmas has been conquered by all the people you hate, though, Elvis Costello sits down at the piano and sings “There Are Much Worse Things to Believe In” where the ending message is an attempt to locate some earnestness in the whole mess of cynicism. Like everything else in the special, the song has its laugh lines, but I have to believe that the opening is meant to be as much a rejoinder to its audience as a poke at some of the more heinous television blowhards:
“There are cynics. There are skeptics.
There are legions of dispassionate dyspeptics
Who regard this time of year as a more than insincere
Cheesy crass commercial travesty of all that we hold dear.
When they think that, well I can hear it,
But I pity them their lack of Christmas spirit.
For in a world like ours, take it from Stephen:
there are much worse things to believe in.”