This week, one lucky Boston University freshman writing class went on the field trip of a lifetime when College of Arts and Sciences Professor Michael Rodriguez took his class to New York City to a taping of “The Colbert Report.”
Members of Rodriguez’s class, entitled “The Colbert Report: American Satire,” ventured to the Big Apple for Tuesday’s taping of comedian Stephen Colbert’s nightly faux news program.
Rodriguez, a fan of Colbert’s program, said that he had been trying to organize a class trip to the show for most of the semester, which proved difficult, as large groups are usually not permitted to attend the show.
“I worked on organizing this field trip all semester,” Rodriguez said in an email interview. “It was my intention to take the class to the show when I first developed the idea for the course. The tickets were not easy to get because they don’t normally allow large groups to attend the tapings. We were lucky.”
Experiencing a taping of the show was an important end to the course for his students, Rodriguez said.
“It was important for my students to see an actual taping of the show to get a behind-the-scenes look at Colbert’s creative process and to get the opportunity to ask him a few questions that we have been pondering all semester,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez is an avid fan of “The Colbert Report,” and decided that the satire of the program would provide the perfect subject for his freshman writing class this semester.
“He’s at the epicenter of that genre and he does it perhaps better than anyone else doing it this generation,” Rodriguez said in an interview with The Daily Free Press earlier this semester. “He fits into a long tradition and extends that tradition in amazing ways that are unique to the medium, that Jonathan Swift couldn’t have done with his essays.”
With some help from the staff at Comedy Central and “The Colbert Report,” Rodriguez was able to make the class field trip to New York for the taping happen.
“I coordinated with Renata Luczak at Comedy Central and with Stewart Nurick at ‘The Colbert Report,’” Rodriguez said. “They were extremely generous with us and made the field trip possible. They also went out of their way to make us feel at home when we got there.”
Rodriguez said that his class aims to find the place where pop culture and academics meet. The answer to this question may be “The Colbert Report.”
“There is a place in academia for pop culture and it’s becoming more popular,” Rodriguez said. “I do think over the next decade there will be more courses offered on subjects that have not been traditionally accepted into the academy. Anything that’s politically and socially conscious cannot be mere entertainment.”
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