A candidate for our time

Desperate times require desperate candidates. How do you gauge national desperation? Stephen Colbert is polling in double digits.

For you cable-free readers, comedian Colbert’s “The Colbert Report” stars the real Colbert as the character Colbert in a deadpan send-up of the bumptious, righter-than-thou malarkey merchants of cable TV news.

Colbert (the character) announced he’d run for president in his home-state primary in South Carolina. A national poll by Rasmussen Reports and Fox News, the cable channel populated by the bully boys Colbert parodies, put him at 12% against Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. More than a million Facebook members have signed on for Colbert.

The real candidates, some of whom poll below Colbert, are trying to go along with the joke without becoming the butt of it. Is this guy funny or frightening?

Film and fiction love putting unlikely characters into the Oval Office. Over the years, we’ve seen black men as president (James Earl Jones and Chris Rock), women (Geena Davis and Polly Bergen), a genial look-alike (Kevin Kline) and a late-night political comedian (Robin Williams). They all test democracy in our imaginations by placing unexpected figures in the job and checking to see whether the republic’s elastic can keep its snap, and by inference, whether we can eventually accept actual different types in the White House: a woman, a black man, a Mormon, a man married three times (the last two are not the same candidate).

Send-up candidacies like Colbert’s have their own long history. In 1879, in the New York Evening Post, Mark Twain nominated himself with a sardonic confessional: “I have pretty much made up my mind to run for president. What the country wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history. ... If you know the worst about a candidate, to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be checkmated.” Twain punctured plutocrats too well to have made any headway in the smoke-filled rooms of the Gilded Age. But he undoubtedly has more things named after him -- including an asteroid -- than the man who did become president, James Garfield.

Most dark-comic candidacies emerge in grim times: Pat Paulsen in 1968, Will Rogers in 1932.

Comedian Paulsen was a regular on the politically bold “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” a TV show that kept network censors fully employed until it was finally yanked off the air. He ran for president as the Vietnam War was rupturing the country. The nation saw a TV war overseas and wall-to-wall TV campaigning at home, and Paulsen mocked by imitation. The man who produced Paulsen’s campaign “special” so impressed real politicians that he wound up being hired for real political events, and then by the Nixon White House.

Will Rogers was already a beloved national figure, the common man with a lazy lariat and an ice-pick wit, when the Depression sucker-punched the country. In 1932, there were serious ructions in favor of a Rogers candidacy. When 20th Century Fox announced that he’d star in “If I Was President,” The Times remarked archly on the “whispers that many people in these United States wouldn’t mind seeing Will in some big political office.” A Republican businessmen’s group in Oregon ardently lobbied the state’s Democrats to nominate Rogers. At the convention, Rogers got 22 votes on the second ballot -- almost as many as the governor of Maryland.

The humorist finally squelched the draft-Rogers movement in his newspaper column, without a hint of a smile: “When it was done as a joke it was all right, but when it’s done seriously it’s pathetic. There is no inducement that would make me foolish enough to ever run for political office.”

Colbert is the comedian of this moment, crusading for “truthiness,” whatever the facts. Colbert told fans to change the Wikipedia entry for African elephants to reflect Colbert’s “truthy” belief that the elephant population had not declined but tripled in six months. They did. A Bush administration political appointee ordered Interior Department scientists to alter facts in reports on imperiled species. FEMA staged a fake news conference to congratulate itself on its performance in the California wildfires. Truthiness in action.

Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris, at East Carolina University in North Carolina, edited “Laughing Matters: Humor and American Politics in the Media Age.” They concluded that political humor makes people more politically astute but also more cynical -- and they’re studying now whether it makes them less inclined to vote.

“I don’t necessarily go to bat saying the average American voter is well informed and all that razzmatazz, because they’re not, clearly,” said Baumgartner. But they have a certain “low information rationality,” and whatever Colbert’s numbers now, they know there’s a difference between answering a pollster’s question and actually voting.

These days, who truly has more influence -- a politician, or someone who plays one on TV? Deep in his darkly comic heart, Colbert knows the answer -- and I’m sure he hopes that we do too.

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patt.morrison@latimes.com