Comedy Variety Show 2.0

On June 3, 2008, Barak Obama claimed the Democratic party nomination in front of over 20,000 people at the Xcel Center in Saint Paul. On that same day, John McCain addressed a much smaller group of supporters in Kenner, LA, which provided a sharp contrast to Obama's address. McCain's speech was "widely panned", and almost no one who wrote about it failed to comment on the green backdrop.



As you can see in the clip above, during the June 4 episode, Stephen Colbert played a clip of the speech, saying that McCain had taken "a bold step of enhancing his performance by speaking in front of a green screen, issuing a bold challenge to Americans to make him seem interesting." Colbert then offered his viewer the oppotunity to "help the Senator" by downloading footage of the speech from Colbertnation.com and adding their own enhancements to the speech. Over the course of the next two months, Colbert played a handful of the submissions that had been uploaded to the website. While this was not the first (or the last) "Green Screen Challenge" issued by Colbert, this one asked viewers to supply political commentary.

I might be out of the loop, but I think this kind of viewer-generated content is a relatively new phenomena in the world of politicl participation. The video uploads take the "Letters to the Editor" feedback mechanism to a whole new level.