'Christmas' Gold: Stephen Colbert's Nonsense and Mirth

Stephen Colbert gets to show off his singing voice, and his screaming voice, in "A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All," a holiday special like no other.

Actually, it's a holiday special like all others, in that it includes a snowy, simulated sleigh ride, treacly seasonal songs, chestnuts roasting on a virtual open fire and glittery guest stars. But it's all part of a felicitous hoax.

Colbert's hour is a parody of the kind of holiday specials that used to pop up every year on the broadcast networks (his screams are the result of a furry faux bear laying siege to his fake mountain cabin), and yet it still brings back warm memories -- for those old enough to remember -- of Christmases spent with Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Andy Williams and even Donald Duck.

They all strove mightily not to offend, whereas Colbert, comic prince of Comedy Central, takes the opposite tack. Thus, guest star Toby Keith, toting an assault rifle, sings an original song about making "War on Christmas" that supposedly denounces the forced secularization of the holiday, but is also decorated with such sights as Christmas-tree bombs falling from Santa's airplane and a smiley face painted on a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Talk about bad taste! (As an irate woman harrumphed while exiting the theater in the original film "The Producers.") But Colbert doesn't just talk about it; he perpetrates it with his usual mock-sinister glee. Like holiday hosts of old, he greets his guest stars by loudly identifying them for us folks at home -- "R&B superstar John Legend!" or "country music legend Willie Nelson!" -- each greeting followed by an abrupt burst of canned applause.

The laughter is canned, too, and executive producer Colbert makes sure to ladle it lavishly over every segment.

Nelson sings a song about enjoying his favorite "Wonder Weed" during the holidays; it includes such lyrics as "The wise men started tokin' " and "Let not mankind bogart love." Nelson appears as a miniature shepherd in a creche scene. Elvis Costello, meanwhile, dons various guises, among them a toy soldier, a jack-in-the-box and the hapless victim of a bear attack. The bear lingers in rear-screen woods for most of the special but (major spoiler alert) somehow gobbles up Costello late in the show -- but don't worry: Elvis lives.

Cunningly or just coyly, Colbert gets to have his fruitcake and eat it, too -- though, of course, no one ever really eats those awful things. The trick is in blurring the line between spoof and reality, so that when Colbert and George Wendt (in a Santa suit) pretend to make fun of shameless plugs, they are in fact shamelessly plugging the DVD version of this show, on sale soon at stores everywhere.

Sometimes Colbert mimics the old-time hosts in the wrong way. Is he spoofing egomania or just practicing it when he manages to turn up in virtually every number performed by his guest stars? The eclectic group includes the singer known as Feist and Colbert's Comedy Central colleague Jon Stewart, who sings a token Hanukkah song in which "enjoy 'em" is rhymed with "goyim."

You have to say one thing for "A Colbert Christmas": It is merry. Definitely merry. As merry as a stumbling drunk slipping on ice. Concluding that there are "much worse things to believe in" than Christmas, Colbert philosophizes that "without Christmas, there's nothing to calm me down after Halloween." His exercise in vanity, faked sentiment and patent absurdity -- sure to join all those wretched animated shows as a "holiday perennial" -- is a figgy pudding of a show, whatever the heck a "figgy pudding" is.

Regardless, bring it on.

A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All (one hour) airs tomorrow night at 10 on Comedy Central.