Why Steven Colbert Isn't Funny

It's not because he's political or even a raging, snarky partisan. Sometimes they can be funny, too, even when you disagree with them.

Steven Colbert isn't funny because his jokes don't make sense.

His recent anti-Trump spasm culminated when he accused the president of having an intimate relationship with Putin. Ha ha ha?

How does that make any sense at all? Why not charge him with being in love with, oh, I don't know, the star of Hamilton? Trump was clearly Putin's worst outcome of the election. Russia gets most of its money from oil and Trump has taken dramatic steps to increase American oil production. This lowers the price of oil and takes billions of dollars out of the pockets of the Russian oligarchy. It's not that complicated.

Meanwhile, if anyone was kneeling to Putin it was Obama and Clinton. They gave away Crimea, part of Eastern Ukraine, did nothing when the airliner was shot down and let the Russian proxy, Syria, run wild.

If comedy is going to have any bite at all, it has to at least be based partly in truth. Colbert's rant was utterly unmoored from reality. It was so deranged that I'm not sure a religious fundamentalist analogy would do it justice. It was more like complete cognitive dissonance of the type Scott Adams describes.

When your self-image and ego get annihilated ... you can’t simply admit you have been ridiculous all along. Your brain can’t let you do that to yourself. So instead, it concocts weird hallucinations to force-glue your observations into some sort of semi-coherent movie in which you are not totally and thoroughly wrong. That semi-coherent movie will look like a form of insanity to observers.

Colbert isn't funny, he's just kind of odd.