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Guy YedwabWriting The Essay4/8/2007Flattening (Ex 6)When I was young, I found it odd that artists often had to flatten things to reproduce them. TV, photography, and paintings are all flattened representations of the real world. Radio removed the physical existence, and sculpture removed the element of movement. Theater, on the other hand,seemed the only fully three-dimensional reproduction we could make of the world.Theater is, however, prone to a one-dimensionalization of another kind: the stereotype. Byflattening the people represented, they become less real and, rather than expanding our view, narrowsit. It allows us to distance ourself from different ideas and views, to protect ourselves from the possibility we may be wrong. As Christopher Lehman Haupt says (quoted in Anne Bogart's essay,“Stereotype”), “The problem with cliches is... [that] they insulate us from expressing our realemotions.”In the political arena, stereotypes are rampant on every side. Stereotypes deepen the politicaland social divides by entrenching the differences between different groups, and making reconciliationever harder. So when Stephen Colbert began
The Colbert Report 
, playing the stereotype of the Right-wing blow-hard media pundit (in other words, a mix of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity), I was veryskeptical that the satirical aptness and open-mindness I had seen on Stephen's previous show,
The DailyShow with Jon Stewart 
, would carry over into this new caricatured format.If had read Anne Bogart's essay “Stereotype” beforehand, however, I would have understood
The Colbert Report 
quicker from the outset. Rather than simply presenting stereotypes, he seems to“[light] a fire under [them],” as Bogart describes. The way in which the stereotype becomes deeper andmore complex is in the very act of giving it an entire half-hour show. Rather than a momentary glimpseat a quick, two-dimensional stereotype, the half-hour regular show with the same character—StephenColbert—allows us to enter a world created by (and centering around) the character. The character 
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