Letters to the Editor
tomreedtoon
Published Letters: 802 Editor's Choice: 81
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Stand-up comics of the right...and the real comics.
[Read the article: The Coulterization of the American right]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The description of Coulter and Limbaugh as stand-up comics triggers some interesting associations. There are a wide assortment of stand-ups that are there primarily to get the audience laughing. Some of them have an emotional honesty about what they say. But a lot of them, even in this day, just want a reaction, just want fame. Ages ago, Lenny Bruce did a routine about a traditional joke-teller that gets booked at the London Hippodrome, who bombs, and can't understand why the British didn't find him funny. (Bruce has his yukster complain, "Wait! I haven't even done my fag at the ball game yet!")
There was a different variety of stand-up artists, who held to their beliefs and used them in their routines, who held Bruce as a kind of patron saint of comedy honesty. In the current scene, the best representation of such fidelity is probably George Carlin, who has refused to settle into standard jokes and whose views are undeniably his own. (That's my own personal ranking; people like Lewis Black and Chris Rock also do this.)
On the other hand, Dennis Miller clearly went lusting for fame. He took the sarcastic routines he did on Saturday Night Live (he avoided doing any comic acting or participation with other actors on the show) and molded those routines into what he thought was a surefire, boffo career definition; a right-wing stand-up comic.
Technically, that would have been possible if that conservatism was based on genuinely held and understood values. But Miller took an attitude of absolute support for Bush and the neocons, refusing to check their contradictions and failings. He thought he could push the Administration's line better than the people already doing it.
Miller's career has failed badly, and while it's probably wrong to attribute it to his politics, it's the neocon philosophy that rewards loyalty more than integrity that contributed to his decline. The audience isn't as dumb as some people may presume. He blew two talk shows based on his cronyism, and seems to have fallen down to the bottom of the ladder; the last time I saw him was on the late night show Comics Unleashed, chatting with journeyman comics who were sharper and funnier than he was.
When Fox introduced it's "comedy news show" as a "fair and balanced" version of The Daily Show, it also did badly. Some wags even took the standard straight Fox News coverage, dubbed canned laughs to it, and it was funnier than Fox's deliberate attempt at humor. My immediate thought: since Rupert Murdoch wants loyal Bushies and not thoughtful comedians, hiring Dennis Miller to "save the show" would be a logical step. Now, Kamiya makes me wonder if it wouldn't be a better gig for Coulter.
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Explaining coffee to the class.
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Coffee is coffee. It does not taste good. Its only purpose is to inject caffein into your system so you won't fall asleep at work. Minimal attempts to modify coffee so it won't make you vomit all over your keyboard, such as the addition of sugar, sweetener or creamer, are simple bows to human physiology.
But cappucino, latte, and super-frappucino-with-a-cherry-on-top-shaken-not-stirred are pretentious lies. It is coffee with fishnet stockings on. It is a lame attempt to suggest that coffee actually has a taste that human beings would like, when it's still the same foul crap every other sleep-deprived schlub gulps down. To suggest it "tastes better" or that it is a drink a sane, healthy person would choose to drink, is lying to yourself.
And that is why Heather Havrilesky is forever associated with latte. It is the essential belief that drives her and her defenders; that it doesn't matter what nauseating stuff you turn out; as long as it has "style," it's faaaaaabulous.
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This isn't comedy. It's reportage.
[Read the article: Bee sting]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not sure who said that first - I think it was about Network as a critique of television news - but it applies here.
I work for a TV station that runs The Insider. This piece is closer to what that horrid show runs than Samantha Bee would probably believe. And never more so than in the last three weeks. In a real-world reproduction of "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!", the show is taking a tour of a morgue to show what Anna Nicole Smith's corpse went through when wheeled through that door some lucky paparazzi shot from a rooftop.
The only thing that Bee did not accurately reproduce is the laziness that even flighty productions like this demonstrate. The "co-anchor" who spends time in a makeup chair and saying nothing is fairly close to Pat O'Brien's stupor (for all I can tell, this supreme judge of celebrity life may have fallen off the wagon again). But worse than that, shows like The Insider simply "re-purpose" video from other shows. In this case the "morgue tour" is just snippets from a Discovery Channel documentary on autopsies; they didn't even have enough class to take video from the HBO autopsy shows. And when Steve Irwin died, they culled shots not only from his show, but from Animal Planet shows about manta rays and similar animals (that were just conveniently re-running at the time to pick up some of the Crocodile Hunter heat).
To do this completely right, Ms. Bee should have done a piece completely made up of clips of monster babies from slasher films, maybe even the "mutant spider baby-head doll" from Toy Story.