Texas town upset with Stephen Colbert

updated 6:23 p.m. ET Aug. 15, 2008

Stephen Colbert’s one-man campaign against towns named Canton has its latest target firing back.

A city councilman in Canton, Texas, joked that he would “mash his nose” after the comedian referred to the town as an “incorporated outhouse.”

“What does that sucker know about it? He’s never been here anyway,” Councilman John Fuller said in a story Friday in the Tyler Morning Telegraph.

In an ongoing gag on his Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report,” Colbert has been taking pot shots at various towns named Canton. It began when he referred to a Georgia town as “the crappy Canton.”

Colbert then referred to Canton, Kan., with an unprintable epithet, and referred to Canton, S.D., as “North Dakota’s dirty ashtray.”

Cantons in Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Ohio have so far escaped Colbert’s ire.

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Leaders of the Texas town of Canton, which has a population of about 5,100, invited Colbert to the town’s monthly flea market — which, according to a city Web site, harks back to Texas’ frontier traditions, “when it was common to trade a rifle for a good hunting dog.”

“Canton is known worldwide,” City Manager Andy McCuistion said of the town, located about 55 miles southeast of Dallas. “You can go anywhere in the world, and people will say, ‘Canton? Yeah, I know where that is. It’s where that big flea market is.”’

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