Your favorite TV Time Tracker figured one of those knuckleheads at The Blotter would have already, uh, blottered this, but in case you missed it: Orange County's very own right-wing whackmaster Hugh Hewitt was on The Colbert Report the other night–and he wasn't even being punked like some other recent OC politicos were by a different Comedy Central faux news program. And damn if Baby Hughie wasn't reserved as host Stephen Colbert, who does the second best right-wing whackmaster impression on television (no one can top Papa Bear, Bill O'Reilly), filled most all of the air by taking Hewitt to task for his new book Painting the Map Red not going far enough. (Colbert wants all 50 states red, despite Hewitt's protestations that Cali and the Big Apple are lost causes.) When we discovered many key Weeklings missed Hughcifer, one mused that he's such a shameless self-promoter he surely has a video link to the broadcast on his site. Sure enough, here'tis.
However, even funnier than the funny Colbert-Hewitt repartee is Hughie's explaining away his silence on Colbert farther up on his site. See, HH learned long ago from interviewing comedians (Harry Shearer, Tracy Ullman, Dick Cheney) that his questions are just set-ups for their comedy bits. So he seamlessly slipped into “reverse mode” with Colbert, the host's comedic questions allowing Hugh to assume the quiet “Dick Smothers” character. (For you coveted center-of-Weekly demographic readers who do not know who Dick Smothers is, ask your grandparents).
To paraphrase a much better straight man, “Say goodnight, Hugh …”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.