Colbert’s topics of truthiness range far

It’s tempting to say that if Stephen Colbert represents the face of America, then perhaps America should ask its doctor about plastic surgery. In “I Am America (And So Can You!),” Colbert -- the satirist-cum-soothsayer host of the extravagantly popular Comedy Central talk show “The Colbert Report” -- presents a book that was, according to the jacket, “[d]ictated directly into a microcassette recorder over a three-day weekend.” Besides his distinctive brand of rabble-rousing gas, it contains multiple stickers, activity pages and a satiny red bookmark.

That satin, incidentally, is as soft as the pronunciation of the “t” at the end of both his last name (Coal-BEAR) and “report.” Perhaps it is not for nothing that the back flap of the book depicts a gamma-ray mutated Steve-as-Hulk planting an American flag in the brain of a dying bear. The physical book itself is pushy in its odd size -- a little like the ego of the endlessly energetic Stephen Colbert, the Deal-a-Meal card in the Casino Royale of modern political commentary.

Colbert holds forth on sports, the family, old people, animals, higher education, sex and homosexuals. Clearly it was an epic 72 hours over which he stressed and obsessed over these touchstones of the modern American experience; although this cursory overview of what’s on Colbert’s mind indicates as much focus as a headless chicken, his passion for denouncing the evil in America -- and how he’s right to condemn everyone for destroying his dreams -- is stauncher than staunch.

He rails against “Pat the Bunny,” details his first job writing the police blotter for the Dorchester County Pennysaver in South Carolina, takes a cue from the Chinese by proposing construction of a 2,000-mile wall at the U.S. border to keep out immigrants and thanks Chevron (with Techron) for sponsoring his chapter on sports. He thinks that our God is an awesome God not only because he reigns from Heaven above but also because cats can walk on water too. In Colbert’s world, all deities from Anubis to Zeus evolved into Jesus -- including Caveman Jesus.

Flowcharts to determine gayness, a sexual compatibility quiz in which respondents must match themselves to the right troika of Supreme Court member/tree/dessert topping -- these many extensions of his self-aggrandized folderol reach out like a squid’s tentacles across a sea of Stephen Colbert. With tiny red rejoinders -- a cross between a Greek chorus of common sense and Sergio Aragones’ “Mad Marginals” cartoons -- cavorting in the margins, he builds a Winchester Cathedral of pomp and circumstance. Or, at the very least, a Winchester Mystery House of relentless banging away at evil liberal ghosts.

Colbert is that annoying whine that appears in the ear at inopportune times, just when one wishes for peace and quiet the most (11:30 p.m./10:30 Central) -- and with this latest broadside in the war against sin and people not like himself, he proves that he is to journalism what Jack Chick tracts are to theology: damning hyperbole, scathing bluster of the most evangelical sort, and infinitely more “YAAAAH!” than the competition.

And yet it is in the appendix -- a chapter that shares a name with the apparently superfluous organ in the body recently revealed as producing healthy germs for the gut -- that Colbert includes the essential and most rewarding part of the book: A transcript of his speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents Assn. dinner -- a traditionally staid and stodgy orgy of beige glad-handing -- reveals in brilliant black-and-white precisely how he told the president exactly what he knows to be the truth.

It was a frank dissection of the state of affairs in America, gracefully presented via comedy at its most deifically aware. This example of transcendent truth-telling that forever changes societies and the way people think about the world in which they live was delivered with a shock and awe the administration could not have possibly anticipated, during which people in power steamed in uncomfortable silence simply because he told the truth. Or truthiness, as the case may be.

It was a deeply necessary speech, coming at a pivotal point for the public’s perception of the current administration. These were obvious truths that should be spoken -- and they were truths amplified in their resonance by the breathtaking speed with which they were so swiftly propagated through the Internet.

This zeitgeist, galvanized as a cultural lightning strike, showed that Colbert -- a modern-day amalgam of spirits Pirandello and Voltaire -- is today’s Great Communicator. By the end of “I Am America (And So Can You!),” it’s clear that he’s right about so many things, accusations of the homosexual qualities of baby carrots notwithstanding.

Stephen Colbert is the Bruce Lee of punditry. His contemporaries, by comparison, are Bruce Le, Bruce Lei, Bruce Chen, or, at best, Bruce Li.

David Cotner is a contributing writer to LA Weekly.