Congratulations--just by looking at this webpage, you became 25% more patriotic.
From Stephen Colbert, the host of television's highest-rated punditry show The Colbert Report, comes the book to fill the other 23¿ hours of your day. I Am America (And So Can You!) contains all of the opinions that Stephen doesn't have time to shoehorn into his nightly broadcast.
Dictated directly into a microcassette recorder over a three-day weekend, this book contains Stephen's most deeply held knee-jerk beliefs on The American Family, Race, Religion, Sex, Sports, and many more topics, conveniently arranged in chapter form.
Always controversial and outspoken, Stephen addresses why Hollywood is destroying America by inches, why evolution is a fraud, and why the elderly should be harnessed to millstones.
You may not agree with everything Stephen says, but at the very least, you'll understand that your differing opinion is wrong.
I Am America (And So Can You!) showcases Stephen Colbert at his most eloquent and impassioned. He is an unrelenting fighter for the soul of America, and in this book he fights the good fight for the traditional values that have served this country so well for so long.
'I Am America and So Can You' is hilarious, up to a point (I love his TV Show) but, like his show - it's not too funny after about 1/2 hour. Read it in short bursts or it gets tiresome. I didn't finish it, actually.
Stephen Colbert is a lovely fellow, or so I’ve heard tell. ''Stephen Colbert,'' his blowhard right-wing Comedy Central alter ego, is Hilarious — in 30-minute stretches. But imagine being stuck on a plane with that guy, or in a doctor's office, or (God forbid) in the bathroom. If that sounds good, you've probably already read I Am America (And So Can You!), and are even now plotting some sort of coup to install the Colbert Nation.
The rest of us — casual viewers of The Colbert Report, let's say — are less equipped to handle so much ''truth.'' Granted, ''Colbert's'' opus feels familiar. Anyone who thumbed through America from the Daily Show team in 2004 is hip to the fake-textbook format. However, given his rampant megalomania (see: title), ''Colbert'' can't help ''impregnat[ing] this country with [his] mind'' to write an unholy hybrid that's part civics, part autobiography, part messianic recruitment tract. Witness chapter 1, ''The Family,'' by which he means the ''Colbert'' family, and how we can be more like them. Or chapter 4, ''Religion,'' in which ''Stephen'' exhorts all of us — Jews, gentiles, atheists, and Scientologists — to jump on the ''Jesus Train.'' The contortions, twists, and sidesteps the deeply closeted ideologue takes to squeak through the fantastic seventh chapter (''Homosexuals'') could land him on So You Think You Can Dance.
But does it all work? Mostly. ''Colbert'' crams an awful lot into I Am America, so much that it sometimes feels forced. Do we need the glossary, quippy marginalia (''Girl babies, drop that teat''), common-man essays, and stickers (one page of notes like ''It's Morning in Colbert-ica,'' another of shiny silver medallions). Probably not, but we do like the stickers and marginalia. The point is, you can carry a joke, an alter ego, or a meta-book only so far. ''Stephen Colbert'' couldn't possibly live up to his hype for 230 pages. But I bet that if Stephen Colbert decided to write a book, he could. “B”
