But then, Twain only invented
American literature nearly single-handedly, while Leno did video sidewalk
interviews with random people to make fun of how much less they knew than
his audience did, and screwed over the careers of two comedians who
were each far more talented than he.
Of course, the Twitter tweet that started the outrage was only a one-liner fragment of the longer segment from the show it was drawn from. But honestly, given the linkbait advantages to pulling something out of context, and the Colbert Report's energetic use of social media, it's probably a miracle this hasn't happened before.
While hunting for something else on Hulu, I noticed a clip of a recent SNL skit it built around a TV game show called "What Is Burn Notice?"
I find Kristen Wiig to be weirdly attractive, even when consigned to bit parts like this. Plus there's a kind of goofy affability about the host's performance that had me laughing. And I have to give them credit for sticking to their premise for almost 4 1/2 minutes.
The problem is that, having watched this clip a couple of times, I'm still not sure what their premise is.
Is it that they don't get why "Burn Notice" has a loyal following? Is it that cable TV is such a Super Bowl of obscurity that you can be the eighth-highest show on cable and still no one knows who the hell you are? (And that the blurb-o-matic TV critics at middle-market papers can be counted on to say something blandly encouraging about almost anything?) Or is it that they think "Burn Notice" really is a pretty good show, and they're amazed that no one seems to know about it?
Your guess is as good as mine.
But when I saw the thumbnail for that clip, titled "Burn Notice Game Show," I was certain what it had to be. It's true, I was wrong, but I was certainly wrong. That's important. Let me explain:
Anyone who's made it even halfway through one episode of "Burn Notice" knows the show element that most begs for parody: The voice-overs by the main character (Michael Westen, a blacklisted CIA agent stuck in Miami, doing soldier-of-fortune and help-the-underdog work until he can figure out who sold him out) explaining the everyday business of espionage. He does it with the bored-but-patient tone you'd expect if he'd been sentenced to 100 hours of community service teaching covert-ops techniques at the local Learning Annex. In fact, part of the fun is that his low-key pedantic delivery is so completely out of sync with the step-by-step mayhem he's explaining.
For example:
(For some reason, Hulu occasionally resets the start/stop times of clips. Just in case, that clip goes from the 13:50 mark to the 15:00 mark.)
Like it or loathe it, that shtick is as much a part of the show's DNA as palm trees, sun glasses, and thong bikinis. If you want to lampoon "Burn Notice," that's where you start. And you'll need the sing-song tone. (See? It's contagious.) In fact, the show's already ahead of the curve--it's been poking fun at itself for this gimmick almost since the beginning:
(Like "Ask a Spy," those baffling promotional spots signaling the show's return from hiatus, such as the one that SNL found so . . . baffling, were also the show taking a knowing poke at its own well-established style.)
A friend who's caught the "Burn Notice" bug reports that, just to irritate his family, he sometimes speaks only in Westen-ese:
If you want to get rid of a lot of snow, you're going to need a heat source. A water softener can be made to work for this.
So what I was expecting from that SNL clip was a "Jeopardy!"-style quiz show--except that it's not in the form of a question that the contestants are required to phrase their answers. To wit:
Host: All right, contestants: Question number one: I have $1400 in traffic tickets, and my car was just impounded. What do I do?
Host: No, sorry. That answer is incorrect. Contestants?
Contestant #2: Sneak into the impound lot and use a spare key to start the car and drive it out? [Penalty buzzer sounds.]
Host: Oh, I'm sorry, but remember, contestants--the answer must be in the form of a Michael Westen voice-over.
Contestant #3: Retrieving a car from an impound lot is a matter of remembering that these guys aren't paid much money. They're expecting things like guard dogs and razor wire to do their work for them. That's your advantage. You'll need two lengths of PVC pipe and some low-fat mayo or salad dressing. Using a heavy blanket to cover the razor wire, scale the fence at the farthest point from the office, and . . . [Chimes ring, audience applauds]
Host: Yes! Congratulations Contestant Number Three! Now let's move over to the isolation booth for the lightning round!
(Hey, SNL--you're welcome. )
If you want to parody something, the easiest way is to exaggerate one of its most obvious characteristics, while still keeping it recognizable. In television, that often means placing it in some setting where it doesn't belong: Sharks delivering candygrams to apartment buildings. Interplanetary invaders living undercover as a suburban family. A gentle children's show host in a dangerous tenement apartment. Opera singers delivering the news. Or you can make one of your target's most familiar gimmicks the object of a game show. . . .
Case in point: The fall of Eliot Spitzer. Don't expect to find a lot of "There but for the grace of God go I" humor from the right-wing media over this. Expect instead a lot of "Forget about us! Look at him!" chortling. Conservative humor will never advance beyond the larval stage until it can say, "Whew--glad to see someone besides us making idiotic mistakes like that."
Consider the treatment Spitzer's story got on "The Daily Show" last night. You can tell it's "liberal" humor, but certainly not by its choice of targets, which is fairly ecumenical. The giveaway is its stance and tone.
And they don't let up in the next segment--if anything, they twist the knife harder.
Name-calling without even a glimmer of self-awareness isn't satire; it's just name-calling.
By the way: If that is in fact Samantha Bee's husband in that second clip--and I'm betting it is--then I must grudgingly concede that he is indeed worthy of her. Not every husband would submit to the indignity of that sketch just so his wife could skewer a shortly-to-resign state governor.
And what the hell: La Bee is just so damned funny when she's deadpan, let's watch one of her all-time triumphs, even though it isn't on-topic.
(And for anyone who's wondering, I haven't said anything about the Spitzer mess because I don't have much to add to Lance Mannion's take.)
[Update: This just in from Doctor TV:
Jason Jones is Samantha Bee's real husband (if you recognize Canadian marriages).
Here's the early report of last night's annual White House Correspondents Association dinner:
Rich Little, with shockingly dyed hair, said at the outset that he is “not political” but rather a “nightclub performer who does a lot of dumb, stupid jokes,” then proved that.
He started with a couple of Canada (his native country) jokes and a weak Sen. John McCain, which bombed, as did an impression of.Arnold Schwarzenegger, causing him to look at the crowd askance. “You thought Colbert was bad,” he finally joked.
With that he pulled out one of his classics, Johnny Carson, with a joke about lawyers being “assholes,” which drew a laugh from the president, despite the off-color language.
Then he did Andy Rooney asking: “If you overdosed on Viagra how would you get the coffin closed?”
Little followed by doing six presidents, including a man he “loved,” Ronald Reagan. He put in false teeth to play Jimmy Carter saying that when he was a peanut farmer “I had the biggest nuts in the county.”
As the presidents got more recent, the impressions got weaker: George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and then possibly the worst impression of all, the current president. But he closed with the one he is most famous for, Richard Nixon, saying, “Let’s bring him out of the mothballs one more time.”
Little proceeded to do Nixon shaking his head uncontrollably, quipping, "I’m having a jowl movement.”
Speaking to E&P afterward, probably aware that his routine went over rather poorly, he said, "this is not the easiest audience in the world." But he said Bush told him when it was over, "absolutely perfect."
Some in the crowd walked out in the middle of the routine-- far more than left during Colbert's performance last year.
Ah yes. Andy Rooney-Viagra jokes. This year's dinner isn't likely to get as many You Tube hits as last year's, is it?
It's sad to realize that Little's triumph was that more guests walked out on him than on Colbert the year before. Actually, I'm not sure who should be more disheartened by that.
Correction: In our January 23, 2007, post, we wrote:
There will come a point at this year's gathering when, after schmoozing and dining with the very people they're supposed to be watching out for, all the swells will loosen their cummerbunds or slip off their heels, sit back . . . and realize to their horror that they're going to be forced to spend the next 25 minutes trying to digest the lamb brochettes in mint and coriander while listening to a stand-up act by someone who played a murderer on "Hawaii Five-O."
Guests will dine on bourbon brown sugar shrimp with chipotle appetizer alongside a terrine of white corn and butternut squash and greens with peach citrus viniagrette.
The upscale salmon is twinned with a petite filet in a rich cafe au lait sauce and green peppercorns. Caramelized onion mashed potatoes will also make an appearance.
As for dessert, well, sorry, that’s a virtual state secret, but we can report that the unusual twin pastries combine mango mousse and chocolate espresso.
As our readers will note, it was a completely different menu that sat like lead inside the slowly horrified audience as they listened to a stand-up act by someone who played a murderer on "Hawaii Five-O." Everyone here at p3 deeply, deeply regrets the error.
So it may or may not surprise you to learn that those findings (from about 3-4 years ago) have been borne out--and then some--in a recent Pew Research Center study. Editor & Publishersums it up:
[D]espite the mass appeal of the Internet and cable news since a previous poll in 1989, Americans' knowledge of national affairs has slipped a little. For example, only 69% know that Dick Cheney is vice president, while 74% could identify Dan Quayle in that post in 1989.
Other details are equally eye-opening. Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot -- with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.
Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.
The producers of the Today Show and GMA must be proud indeed.
Here at p3 we're certainly proud of our boys--even if it's only a reflection of how low the bar has really been set these days. Hard to imagine Comedy Central ad salesmen going to their clients and saying, "Good news--our viewers are smarter than Geraldo Rivera's!" Still, as Stewart and Colbert would probably be the first (not counting Don Rumsfeld) to acknowledge, you go with whatever you've got.
One last thought: According to the Pew Report, 31% of Americans polled couldn't name the current Vice President of the United States. (That's down 5% from 1989.)
This has to be one of the most encouraging bits of news I've read in a long time:
China's Southern Metropolis Weekly magazine recently reported this shocking news: The central government created universal health care for the country's 1.3 billion people, wiped out bribery and reduced the country's wide income gap.
Migrant workers in the southern city of Guangzhou, notorious for its sweatshops, were "happy" and "respected," the magazine reported in its print and Web editions.
Of course, it was political parody. And all untrue.
Virtually unheard of several years ago, such blatant satire is part of a radical shift sweeping Chinese culture as Internet use spreads and citizens increasingly evade censorship by couching criticism in sarcastic humor.
China has become so awash in a new wave of sarcastic — and often subversive — media that the trend has spawned a name: egao, literally, "evil work."
The word describes "a subculture that is characterized by humor, revelry, subversion, grass-root spontaneity, defiance of authority, mass participation and multimedia high tech," said a recent editorial in the government-run China Daily.
While the government tightly controls traditional media channels including television, radio and print, "the Internet has given people the chance to express themselves," said Guo Xinghua, a sociologist at People's University in Beijing.
"Egao is a term for how average people are seizing back the discourse," he said.
Speaking in code to avoid backlash from a repressive government is an old trick--ask Aesop.
What these folks in China are up to is a little bit trickier, though, since much satire and most sarcasm relies on idiom and cultural references to make itself intelligible, which is probably why Southern Metropolitan Daily, like its internet counterparts, doesn't really survive translation and retelling . (Well, okay, maybe some parts do survive.) But its mixture of independent investigative journalism and good old-fashioned smart-assedness can be hard to keep under rein in the internet age.
And to think the gerontocracy running China was worried that western-style consumerism or human rights reform would do them in. Silly buggers.
Con amore--that was a watchword of a fellow I was privileged to teach rhetorical theory in the same department with, in another lifetime. Even with an interlocutor whose position you'd spend your lifetime working to refute, he insisted, the only proper way to do so is with a stance that is nevertheless charitable, respectful--not because it's ethically or tactically correct, but because by choosing the tools of rhetoric you can't do it any other way. That decision's already been made when you decided to talk to the guy and not beat him with a club.
It can be a hard thing to wrap one's head around. And, having called a couple of people a "stuffed burp," or worse, on this blog, I'm obviously in no position to propose a christlike standard of behavior for political rhetoric. And that's lucky, because that's not my point.
So let's go back to political satire for a moment. As an approach to all confrontation, even all political confrontation, con amore is a very tall order. I won't even pretend I've always cleared that bar myself, even though I honor the point.
But in satire, that attitude is not just a level you'd like to hit, it's the whole point. In a nutshell: Political attacks that portray one's opponents as monstrous may be pragmatically necessary, and they may be practically effective, but they'll never be funny. And that means they'll never have the advantages that humor offers in a fight.
I talked about this a little last month, somewhat indirectly, contemplating the arrival of the dreadful-as-we-expected "Half-Hour News Hour" on Fox News Channel. I said that the Fox satire-wannabe would never get there unless it was willing to dish it out to its own side, as well as to its opponents. And that's not because of some silly notion of "balance" or "equal time"--you kick my guy, I'll kick yours. It's because you can't do a proper satirical number on your opponent's flaws if you can't at least tacitly acknowledge your own.
Stephen Colbert, a faux conservative who often honors himself on his Comedy Central show, was lauded by the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival as their "Person of the Year."
"What an honor. An honor to receive and an honor for you to give to me," Colbert said during the ceremony late Friday.
Often appearing to be a combination of Bill O'Reilly and Archie Bunker, Colbert emphasized that his television character is not him.
"He's not malicious, he's ill-informed, you know. It's just a product of his own education. And he thinks he's saying and doing the right thing, he's not actually trying to hurt anybody," said Colbert.
It's true: Colbert's on-screen character says and does appalling things, but not because he's evil or hateful (and remember, this is as close as anyone's likely to get to a direct send-up of O'Reilly himself), but simply because, as Colbert plays him, he's self-important, thoughtless, and largely unable to understand the way people see him. These aren't the characteristics of a monster; they're among the flaws that make us all recognizably human. And that's why we like the Colbert character, perhaps even in spite of ourselves.
O'Reilly, as well as Colbert's lesser targets, is thus allowed to start off with a fair amount of karmic capital even when Colbert is gleefully doing his worst to him. If you find conservative humor unfunny, ask yourself if this isn't the reason why.
It's been the sort of week that militates against posting--apologies--but the up side is that I can follow up directly on my previous post about the Fox News Channel's oxymoronic right-wing satire show.
My original plan, early in the week, was to talk about its dreadfully over-the-top laugh track, comparing it to the punchline of an old joke about a kid who was so ugly his parents had to tie a pork chop around his neck so the family dog would play with him.
The passage of time has allowed me to go at it in a somewhat higher-toned manner.
In fact, I'm simply going to turn it straight over to Keith Olbermann, who takes the principle to its logical extreme: If bad satire can benefit from a heavy-handed laugh track, why wouldn't the same be true for ridiculously ideologically slanted "news?"
Yes, friends, I'm afraid it's time for another essay by the right into the tricky business of satire. Obviously they learned nothing from the experience of P.J. O'Rourke; Dennis Miller's descent into unfunny hell didn't catch their notice. But surely they've noticed that Mallard Fillmore can't buy a laugh, even from humor-starved readers of the Indianapolis Star-News. Nevertheless, they're casting their some small part of their fates to the winds of humor again. As Samuel Johnson said, it's not done well, but you're surprised to see it done at all.
Here's where they go wrong:
The elements of satire are a tone of irony and a taste of anger. It's true that, to the extent that irony could be described in its elemental form as "professing A while meaning not-A," I suppose we'd have to agree that the right has the discursive fundamentals of this well within their grasp. (One could call that a Burkean reading of the job of White House Press Secretary, in fact.) And as for anger--well, who better the Fox-powered right?
And I suppose that, as regards the basic tool kit of the of satirist--personification, reversal, parallelism, verisimilitude, the rule of three, and so on-- any yutz can at least pick up a hammer and whack something with it, although driving a nail straight and clean is another matter altogether. (Notice, for example, in the promo above, the ascending groups of three, and the repetition of the "anyone" and "gay penguins" lines. Like the Jack Russell terrier struggling on its haunches, you can see they're genuinely trying. But honestly--"gay penguins?" Does anyone still remember what that's a reference to? I suppose it's meant to be a bank-shot, carrying the idea of the fundamental rightness of offending anyone/thing gay, even flightless waterfowl, and lacing it with a little poke at Gorean save-the-ice-shelf-ism. So perhaps it gets some points for cleverness, in a Republican dog whistle kind of way, but does that make it noticeably funny?)
The fatal problem arises, though, when we consider the satiric stance. I'll defer to a Jedi master of the art:
There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity -- like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule -- that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.
Satire adores an unfair fight--but only in the sense that the more powerful its target, the better.
Here is where "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" is apt to run into trouble: Given that its idea of "equal opportunity offense" is offending the left, Democrats--and again, somewhat inexplicably, gay penguins--its sense of "equal opportunity" is a tad stunted. Until they start running harder with jokes about Ann Coulter's Adam's apple or Rush Limbaugh's chemical problems than even TBogg or Digby do (and they won't--conservative humor, like conservative blogging, is a driven-from-the-top business), when they go after their political opponents they won't get anywhere near the level Stewart and Colbert hit on their worst days.
Don't misunderstand: Colbert won't be invited back to this year's White House Corresondents dinner. His performance last year pretty much guaranteed that.
But I would imagine it won't take long this year before everyone present (except George and Laura) will realize they probably had it better when Colbert had the gig. The folks in charge may have erred a tad too far on the side of caution (not to say conservativism) this time around.
"Maybe Colbert was a little hard on everyone last year," it's not hard to imagine them thinking, "but is an impressionist from the '70s really the only other option?" It's a little reminiscent of Reagan Interior Secretary James Watt canceling the Beach Boys' annual Fourth of July concert at the Washington Mall in 1983 on the grounds that they would attract "the wrong element"--and lining up Las Vegas fixture Wayne Newton to perform in their stead.
There will come a point at this year's gathering when, after schmoozing and dining with the very people they're supposed to be watching out for, all the swells will loosen their cummerbunds or slip off their heels, sit back . . . and realize to their horror that they're going to forced to spend the next 25 minutes trying to digest the lamb brochettes in mint and coriander while listening to a stand-up act by someone who played a murderer on "Hawaii Five-O."*
There was a little bit of a kerfluffle after it was announced that Rich Little would be this year's entertainment. Little was quoted as saying the WHCA made it clear to him that he was to go easy on attendees, including the President--the WHCA later adamantly denied any suggestion of prior restraint.
Steve Scully, president of the WHCA, gamely offered that Little's presence on the dais "also coincides with a plan to make the evening more of a look at the history of presidential humor." Ah yes. Imagine the electric thrill in the room when Little recreates the legendary exchange of one-liners between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 campaign.
As Abraham Lincoln said, "Welcome to the Hall of Presidents." Anamatronics never looked so (comparatively) lifelike.
On the bright side, think of it this way: If you've ever suspected that members of the White House press corps lead a much more exciting and socially well-connected life than you do, that night you'll be guaranteed to have your revenge, almost no matter what you're doing.
To update the previous post, more evidence of what happens when a conservative goes up against a satirist who doesn't step out of character. This isn't quite as bad a performance as D'Souza on Colbert, but on the other hand it's not really punishing zinger he meant it to be, either, and either way it gives the General a chance to riff even more.
I have long been intrigued by the system by which the radical right in America, and its front operation, the Republican party, locate and groom the next generation of leaders and operatives--the GOP Pod Farm, I like to call it.
No reflection on this farm system would be complete without mention of one of its prize cash crops, Dinesh D'Souza. (In fact, I can only think of one person who's better parlayed his position as a statistically-rare person of color in conservative circles, combined with an uncanny willingness to toe the ideological party line and vigorously attack any celebration or defense of diversity, into a life of fame and material comfort beyond his wildest dreams or intellectual merit--but we can come back to him another time.)
Prodding our "farm" metaphor just a little farther, D'Souza is like one of those name-brand genetically modified industrial hothouse tomatoes: flavorless, unrelated to anything you'd find in nature, arriving in stores without any natural connection to the season, but favored by distributors because it's been selectively bred to be square-shaped so it's easier to package and ship.
D'Souza is currently touring to promote his latest book, in which he blames the terrorist attacks on New York and DC in 2001 on--ready?--the cultural left in America. (I'm not linking to his book; if you're honestly curious, you can find it.) Such being the way the winds of the zeitgeist are blowing, he soon found himself on "The Colbert Report."
An amusing pattern that's emerged over the life of Colbert's show is that conservatives have been very slow to "get" him, and to realize that they are far more at risk on his show than a liberal would be--or than they would often be on the "Report's" counterpart, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." Colbert's standard satirical approach with conservative guests is to advance positions, in character, that are even more extreme than what the guest is already promoting, egging them into agreeing with him, then watching happily as his ratings go up.
For example, most people remember that Colbert--the comedian--nailed Bush good at last year's White House Correspondents Association dinner (a story about which I'll be saying more soon). But not everyone remembers now, or appreciated then, that the damage was done by the other Colbert--the TV persona of the clueless, self-absorbed right-wing pundit--who had come to praise Bush, not to bury him.
D’Souza repeated the right-wing attack that President Bill Clinton “did absolutely nothing” to fight global terrorists. Stephen Colbert jokingly asked, “Doesn’t some of it lie at FDR’s doorstep? Doesn’t things like Social Security and Medicare and LBJ’s Great Society, doesn’t some of that send the wrong message to our enemies?”
D’Souza answered, “Indirectly, yes,” explaining that “FDR gave away Eastern Europe through Yalta, and then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Muslims had to fight back and that’s where bin Laden got his start.”
Blaming Clinton, of course, was why D'Souza was there. But what on earth led him to foolishly follow Colbert down the garden path to blaming the New Deal and the Great Society for global terrorism?
There are several possible factors to blame it on: Conservatives generally find humor--especially irony and above all self-deprecating irony--to be a difficult business to negotiate successfully. And (resurrecting my metaphor one last time), the pod farm monoculture that would produce a D'Souza in the first place would also likely leave him without any natural resistance to an invasive and opportunistic species like Colbert.
And, finally, some would say it isn't that tricky to make D'Souza look bad in the first place, since you've got him helping you at every turn.
Consistent with my theory of why conservatives can't do satire well, Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog explains Howard Kurtz's failure to understand that Jon Stewart putting the needle to Obama doesn't mean Stewart and the entire left have given up on him.
One of those "is this good news or bad news?" facts of the 21st century America is that viewers of "The Daily Show" are better-informed about politics than viewers of Leno or Letterman--and late-night comedy viewers, in turn, are much, much, much better informed than Fox News viewers at any hour of the day.
