Colbert, previously of The Daily Show, today resides over The Colbert Report, a near-daily TV extravaganza in which he plays an American right-wing TV pundit, thrashing everything liberal in his path. While the show deals with reality, its contents are rarely as such. For a lot of outsiders – i.e. non-Americans* – the contents of his show often seem exotic, making the humor quite evident. To a lot of Americans, I know this is not the case. As the syndicated right-wing rhetoric is often reminiscent of Hitler’s charms, Colbert evolves his humor on that and hence, his show is ripe with comments like:

“Once upon a time, racism was a terrible problem in this country.”

“If there’s a bigger contributor to left-wing elitist brainwashing than colleges and universities, I’d like to see it. There’s an old saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Which means a lot of knowledge must be a really dangerous thing. And it is. Look no further than the example of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. He skipped sixth grade, got a Bachelor’s from Harvard followed by a Master’s and a Ph.D., and then embarked on a distinguished academic career of blowing people up. Most Ph.D. biographies have similar endings.”

So, the book is much of the same, also with annotated margin comments! Chapter names vary from The Family, Religion, Sex & Dating, Homosexuals to Class War, The Media, Immigrants and Science, which are just as confrontational, prejudiced, narcissistic and funny as you’d expect.

Reading this book is quite like watching his show. Or watching Bill Hicks do his routine about how the American government fabricated the story on Oswald killing JFK. It’s reality gift-wrapped, although Hicks wasn’t right-winged, erhm.

All in all, a very funny read that aggravated me on more than one occasion, enlightened me on several and made me think of another Colbert quote:

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

• This isn’t applicable to countries where one person owns all media. Yes, you, Italy, and…Rupert Murdoch!