Stephen does Bob

Alessandra Stanley has an article in The New York Times about Stephen Colbert:

The first comedy show entirely taped, edited, and broadcast in a war zone didn’t look like your average USO tour. Except when it did. In Baghdad this past week the host of The Colbert Report was so imbued with the spirit of Bob Hope that he actually twirled a golf club— a Hope trademark— as he told jokes to troops in a former palace of Saddam Hussein. Stephen Colbert, the host, described Iraq as “so nice, we invaded it twice”. Even a taped sketch on Tuesday, in which Mr. Colbert debated himself on the issue of gay soldiers, wasn’t much of a departure from Hope’s old stand-up routines in places like Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay. “Miniskirts are bigger than ever, even some of the fellas are wearing them,” Hope told troops in Da Nang in 1967. A beat. “Don’t laugh,” he added. “If you’d have thought of it, you wouldn’t be here.”
Mr. Colbert’s four-day Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando, sponsored by the USO, was unexpectedly charming. His interviews with generals and even an Iraqi deputy prime minister were pleasant, not barbed, and his stand-up routines proved as easygoing and good-natured as many a Bob Hope performance. Mr. Colbert sometimes let his comic persona as an monomaniacal chicken hawk to the right of Bill O’Reilly slip a little, but mostly he stayed in character, and even that matched up with Hope’s self-caricature as someone egotistical and cowardly.
The difference wasn’t in the humor, or even the technology; it was in the intended audience. Hope’s USO tours were star-studded morale boosters for isolated troops who felt out of touch and forgotten. Mr. Colbert seemed eager to energize viewers who are out of touch with overseas news and have all but forgotten that 130,000 troops remain in Iraq. “I thought the whole Iraq thing was over,” Mr. Colbert told the troops on Monday night in Baghdad. “I haven’t seen any news stories about it in months.”
When Hope went on the road, and his trips to military bases spanned World War Two and Operation Desert Storm, his audiences were young, overwhelmingly male, and cut off from home. Even in Vietnam, servicemen relied on letters and the occasional scratchy phone call. Hope’s lighthearted cracks about the military, war, and women were tailored to amuse and comfort the men on the ground. Mr. Colbert’s skits and stunts— a mock stint in basic training, a haircut administered by General Ray Odierno (ordered, jokingly, by President Obama via a pretaped message)— were designed to hold the attention of easily distracted audiences back home.
Today’s troops are hardly starved for entertainment; they have laptops, video cameras, satellite phones, and every iteration of the Internet, including Skype, Facebook, and Gchats. They stay tuned to television, even Comedy Central. Mr. Colbert’s show is broadcast at 6:30 and 11:30 p.m. Central European time on the American Forces Network. He worked in references to The Real Housewives of New Jersey and even the bickering stars of Jon & Kate Plus 8.
Hope, ever mindful of the mood of men deprived of female company, always brought some cheesecake with him: Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable during World War Two; Jayne Mansfield in Korea; Joey Heatherton, Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch in Vietnam.
There were no torch songs or Golddiggers in white go-go boots on The Colbert Report. The closest thing to Ms. Welch was Tom Hanks, who played himself in a taped sketch about USO care packages. Today’s military is coed and in no mood to joke about it. Mr. Colbert asked Sergeant Robin Balcom, how, since women are not supposed to be in front-line positions, she won a combat badge. Sergeant Balcom, a military police officer, bristled at the word won, as opposed to earn. “I didn’t really win it,” she said. “I was awarded it.” Mr. Colbert quickly apologized.
There’s another difference. When NBC broadcast Hope’s Vietnam Christmas specials in the early 1970s (he performed on Christmas Day, but the fully produced shows were not televised until January), they drew sixty percent of the viewing audience. No conflict has ever been as instantly and closely covered as the Iraq War, but access spurs complacency. In the fractured universe of cable and the Internet, the entertaining of troops doesn’t get a lot of attention. World Wrestling Entertainment produces the annual tribute to the troops; Kellie Pickler, a former American Idol contestant who went to Iraq on last year’s USO holiday tour, made a video diary of her tour that was shown on GAC, the Great American Country cable network.
Mr. Colbert’s audience on Comedy Central isn’t very large (a little over a million on a good day), but he has cachet with young and would-be hip viewers who get most of their news from iPhone applications, blogs, and comedy shows. And that’s one reason Mr. Obama and former presidents humored Comedy Central by taping tongue-in-cheek messages to the troops: they seized the opportunity to participate in a government-sanctioned tribute alongside a comedian popular with people who despise conventional politics and government-sanctioned entertainment. Normally celebrities go to combat zones with the USO. In this case Mr. Colbert took the USO on a trip with Comedy Central.