This week's Sunday NYTimes Magazine cover story was about Stephen Colbert. Good stuff and worth checking out. Note: I'm not actually sure that link will work, what with the NYTimes being pay-walled, but it might and if it doesn't, maybe y'all can use some google-fu to snazz yr way in there somehow.
But even tho the story is overall pretty glowing, there's this one weird section towards the middle where the author mentions Colbert's gig at the White House Correspondent's Dinner back in 2006. The author correctly, I think, notes that it was one of the early defining moments for Colbert, that the video was a viral sensation and that there were pro-Colbert websites up and running by the next day. He also quotes not just one of Colbert's best lines but what's got to be one of the gutsiest things ever said by someone standing mere feet from a POTUS:

"I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things. He stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares."

Fucking brilliant. But around that in those three 'graphs he's saying things like "awkward" and "lame" and "it wasn't, in truth, [his] funniest hour." There's just a pinched, churlish tone to that passage that's at odds with the overall tone of the article. So much so that I wondered if the writer (Charles McGrath) had been part of the DC press corps at the time. But from what I can figure out, he's an arts guy and was probably working on the NYTimes Book Review. Could be that he's spent so much time in journalism and/or at NYTimes that he's internalized the "Village" over-seriousness about what they do and didn't like Colbert poking badgers with spoons. Or maybe it's an age thing. Again from what I could figure out online, McGrath seems to be in his mid-60s now so maybe he's one of those people who think you have to respect the office of POTUS even if you don't like the current occupant. My mom used to say stuff like that to me back in the 80s when I'd get a bit over-zealous with my Reagan bashing. I think I mostly managed to keep any observations about logical consistency to myself later when she'd start in on Bill Clinton. But I digress. McGrath might be one of those types. I'd say he might just be a humorless churl with a stick up his butt except he generally seems to "get" Colbert and enjoy and appreciate what he does for most of the article. So I don't know why he's still bugged by something that happened almost six years ago and which, to me, seems right in line with the rest of the Colbert oeuvre.
Could it be perhaps that his shoes are too tight?