Irony, we know, is always a slippery proposition. It not only functions in the service of a wide array of political interests, but simultaneously subverts and legitimizes its targets. Still, we can go a step further in recognizing irony’s ambiguities by seeing it not simply as a text or technique, but as a complex social interaction. As Linda Hutcheon suggests, irony (and parody, as a form of ironic representation) might be best viewed as a set of plural and shifting relations between text, context, ironist and interpreter. The complications of ironic interaction are particularly evident in the practices of the Colbert Nation, The Colbert Report’s active fan base. At Colbert’s invitation, fans have created videos, changed Wikipedia pages, and stuffed online ballots. Of their own accord, they have initiated several thriving fan sites and devoted countless threads to discussion of the show. Colbert himself has suggested that fans are essential to the Report’s parody, playing the adoring audience to his self-aggrandizing media persona. But fans cannot be understood merely as one more character within Colbert’s parody, for the meanings their practices generate can never be guaranteed nor wholly directed by the program’s producers (despite their efforts to channel fan activity into profit and brand loyalty). While fan practices may indeed extend or support the parodic text, they just as routinely disrupt, overlook, question and rewrite its ironic intentions. We can see this dynamic at work in the program’s “Green Screen Challenge,” in which audience members were invited to edit video of Colbert as a Jedi warrior. While most of the fan submissions that made it on air upheld the program’s parody, depicting Colbert as a right-wing hero fighting Democrats, peaceniks, and space creatures, many of those that did not took entirely different directions. “Angry Boy,” shown here, places Colbert in a 1950 educational film as Tommy, a boy obsessed with space monsters. While juvenile silliness is certainly a component of Colbert’s persona, here it becomes detached from his critique of right-wing media pundits. Instead, the creator channels the segment’s mock-heroic tone into a playful commentary on the helping institutions and the puerile nature of Colbert’s persona, reminding us that irony is an ambiguous communicative tool in which ironic texts and intentions are open to redirection from many sources, and in which meanings can never be prescribed.