ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Stephen Colbert’s humorous deconstruction of colorblindness. Colbert’s critique urges the audience to reflect on the realities of race-consciousness, racism, and racial privilege. Colbert gained popularity as a mock-commentator on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart before launching his own fake-news program, The Colbert Report, in a parody of conservative news programs and pundits such as Fox News. Stephen Colbert’s satire of colorblindness on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report presents an illustrative case study of humor’s critical possibilities. Early in the 2008 presidential primaries, Colbert parodied the reactionary colorblind discourse and revealed the cracks in its logic. Colbert’s comic juxtaposition between a claim that racism is over and the reality of long-standing racialized practices makes it difficult for the audience to accept comfortably his colorblind position. Colbert ironically drew attention to the blatantly ignored realities of race in US culture, thereby highlighting both the unsupportable claim of colorblindness and the inescapable role of racialized thinking in everyday life.
