I Am America by Stephen Colbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Now I know that there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
(From 2006 speech by Stephen Colbert during The White House Correspondents' Dinner)

I have not watched television since mid-1990s so I missed the Colbert phenomenon: his work on The Daily Show, then his own The Colbert Report and The Late Show. The only two things I had known before reading Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) was that my acquaintances tended to consider his TV shows very funny, and - way more important - that he is credited with coining the word 'truthiness.' In the dark old days statements could be qualified as true or not true. Nowadays, with the advent of social media, statements can be qualified as 'truthy' or not based on preconceptions and biases, intuition and 'gut feeling', guidance of peers, and own hierarchy of values rather than on evidence (facts) assisted by logical reasoning and scientific method.

Naturally, because of Colbert's dichotomy between truth and truthiness I expected that I will substantially share his worldview conveyed in the book. Indeed I do, particularly his scorn at people who disdain science and consider it elitist:

"So who gave some lab-coated pipette wielder permission to act like he knows more than I do about mitochondria, just because he spent twenty years of his life studying them in a laboratory? PhDs and 300-page dissertations don't make his opinion any more valid. I happen to have some mitochondria myself, and I can tell you that mine don't take their marching orders from Cal Tech."

What surprised me a lot, though about the book was that it was not as funny as I had expected. I cracked the first smile when reading page 45. The writing was bowdlerized to make most of the potentially funny passages "safe" for any reader. Unfortunately, some jokes must be offensive to someone to be funny, and I will stop here to make my review safe for PC adherents.

Luckily, in the later parts of Colbert's book there is some humor, like this gem coming from the author's take on Hays Code guiding the production of movies in Hollywood:

"If a scene includes a train entering a tunnel, the tunnel shall not be portrayed as enjoying it."

The chapter Sex and Dating tends to be funny too - in this cloying safe sense of humor:

"A Real Man is someone who walks through life the way a pilot walks through an airplane. Cool, calm, and checking out the sexy stews. No matter how tough the situation gets, a Real Man never lets on about the faulty landing gear."

It is really the Appendix that saves the book for me. Stephen Colbert was invited to give a speech at the traditional White House Correspondents' Dinner. In 2006 the author was roasting George W. Bush. The speech is (in)famous for the originally mixed reception in the media and its extreme popularity on YouTube. I can see two reasons for the original cool reception: First, Colbert's speech went way beyond safe humor - some of his statements could be construed as offensive - and therefore it was deadly funny. The other reason is that the speech contained, rather veiled, but very biting criticism of the press.

So yes, mild thumbs up from me, but mostly for the inclusion of the speech, which raises the rating by almost one star.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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