Dan Froomkin has a very good column on the Colbert Moment and journalists like Elizabeth Bumiller who have decided just to ignore the entire thing. He also points to Special Ed, who found the whole event tasteless:
There were two problems with Colbert's act. The first is that it wasn't funny, and the second was that it didn't keep with the spirit of the evening. The Correspondents Dinner prides itself on making the evening a safe venue for all, and the humor is supposed to stay self-deprecating. Attacking one's opponents in this forum is considered bad manners. Colbert has no grasp of his audience or the event, and he paid the price for it. And that price was painful indeed.
Two things. Number one, I talked to John A. at C&L who says he's had something like half a million hits on that clip. "Paid the price?" Well I guess if having the guts to provoke a historic moment in a crowd you know full well is grinding their teeth in humorless, pinched-ass hatred of every word you utter, and you stand up unflinchingly and have the courage to do it anyway, and millions of people across the blogosphere who are starving for some kind of truth are cheering you on, then I guess Ed is right. Price paid.
But the second thing, and I don't often mention this but now seems an appropriate time: when liberals like TBogg or Gavin M. or SZ or Roy Edroso or any other of the wits of the liberal blogosphere sit down behind their keyboards and start tapping out daggers, slicing up the right with eviscerating humor that cuts to the bone, they know full well they are going into battle with unarmed opponents. I don't know what it is about the right that they completely lack any ability to appreciate humor, but they sure as shit can't write it either. I would never mess with the General for fear of what he'd come back at me with. Digby? Oh lord. Atrios, Wolcott, John Rogers ... and I personally send Roger Ailes a fruit basket once a month just to stay on his good side.
I fear no one on the right. Ever. All they are capable of is wavering between ham-fisted brutality and self-righteous pecksniffery. They are outrageously pretentious and their bubbles so easily burst. I think it emboldens the entire left side of the blogosphere, knowing that those on the right are completely incapable of coming back at them with anything other than unimpressive, humorless thuggery.
And it's not a matter of different political affiliations not appreciating the humor of the other; I'm perfectly capable of recognizing talent in people I can't stand. They aren't funny. Ever. About anything. Humor is always an outgrowth of truth, something the right -- as it stands now -- has abdicated in favor of authoritarian cultism.
And to grab a pearl of wisdom from Special Ed, they are paying the price.
Update: SZ has a "Write Like a Wingnut" contest going on. It will be hard to top Gavin M's contribution to our bigotsphere series ("Principa Wingnuttia"), but anyone anxious to, you know, "pay the price" ought to think about entering.
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I am shocked at MSM non coverage of this event. This was newsworthy regardless of how you look at it.
I hear racial and rape jokes are considered funny by some.
I don’t know who Special Ed is, but I followed the link to him or her. Check out the US and Mexican flag stunt for May 1 2006. Some one who puts that up is qualified to be a humor critic? Well, the link is above, you look, you decide.
horse penis jokes are funny? yeah right…
FITZ-like Action!
OT…
The “Gas Price Relief and Rebate Act” that would bribe
each of us with $100 (of our own tax money!)
to allow oil companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
is being rushed to the Senate for a vote; maybe as soon as tomorrow, Tuesday.
Please call your Senators right now and tell them to vote NO on the Gas Price Relief and Rebate Act:
Toll-free Senate switchboard: (888) 355-3588 or (888) 818-6641
or, not toll-free Senate switchboard: (202) 224-3121
Jane, outstanding! — the only ones who don’t like what colbert did are never going to desert bush anyway — bumiller will be with him till hell freezes over: by calling her a journalist, you honor her too, too much
Fitz!
and for LawDay:
Hammurabi!
Blackstone!
Moses!
Muhammad!
Marshall!
Napoleon!
Menes!
Confucius! (Kung Fu Tze!)
Solomon!
Lycurgus!
Draco!
Octavian and Justinian!
Charlemagne!
Grotius!
Kings John & Louis IX
I think back on how the right wing has expressed itself over the last 15 years. The message is all about outrage, finger pointing, blame, and indignation.
Even now, when they have control over everything, they STILL act like angry victims.
The Republican motto ought to be “How DARE you??”
Maybe not. I’ll let Colbert come up with something that is keen, sharp, accurate, and totally hilarious.
‘Hickory Dickory Dock, same old, tired Liberal schlock’
;>)
Bit o’this’n'that.
Even Lisa Murkowski gave thumbs down to the $100 throw-money-at-it bribe during her appearance on Face.
How nice that Rush [and if ever there were an appropriate first name for a hillbilly heroin junkie….] gets to spend Law Day copping a plea and explaining it to his goopers.
Wonder how many people who are protesting the flying of Mexican flags during immigration protests are flying their own stars-n-bars? What’s a hundred years + of anti-Americanism among goober friends….
And, what’s the deal with Bumiller still reporting on the White House? She should have been reassigned as soon as she decided to take the book deal writing Condi’s bio.
Ah, the conflicts, the hypocrisy…smells like…. the freshly “annointed” pastures up here in the north country.
The whole thing about Colbert and “the room” is that Colbert was using “the room” as his props in his act. (Either that, or — like Helen Thomas — they were his willing assistants.)
He wasn’t playing TO “the room”, if by “room” you mean the Bush lackeys physically sitting in front of him. He was playing OFF the room, going into the gig knowing full well that the vast majority of them would not like what he had to say — and their stony silence was exactly what he was counting on to please his REAL audience: You, me and everyone we know (or are forwarding the video links to).
As Dover pointed out, these are the people Colbert was speaking to.
Try making Coulter laugh without the use of racial slurs.
John Casper - from last post. IIRC Bill Kristol was on Colbert Report a few days before the press dinner. At the end he reminded Colbert that he had helped him land the hosting gig. Of course I could be wrong…….
spot on. i was thinking about this earlier. who could the right send forth as their own colbert? hitch? buckley? rush?
they got nothing…
Laughter is to the soul as lightening and thunder is to nature. Profound and terrifing on the horizen but bringing the purifing rain making us feel secure in our shelters. Comedians are sacred “holy persons” “heyokas” in the Lakota tradition.
The beauty of Colbert’s delivery was the utterly pompous puffy hostility of the crowd facing him. The pearl clutching butt clenching expressions of the audience was the perfect foil for Colbert’s wit.
I was surprised to see and hear no mention of colbert’s perfect performance on a few news channels this AM. Also no mention of it on many “news” sites. But, there was plenty of coverage of the bush impersonator.
here are some jokes they probably thought were pretty funny:
-”This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores.”
-”Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.”
-there was also one about not finding WMDs but it escapes me at the moment.
Jane -
The perfect picture for this thread!
I watched Colbert live and he didn’t look uncomfortable, especially compared to the Bush/Cheney cultists in the room.
I much preferred the painful squirming in the audience this year over the smug indifferent chortles heard when Bush ran his “Where are the WMDs?” video 2 years ago!
The tight-*ss Bush sycophants should be thankful Lenny Bruce wasn’t there to suggest they get a hot-lead enema (Francis Gary Powers)!
and can we knock down the spin that bush was funny?
Deborah #5
Thank you for the heads up on this one.
They really want to rush to drill in the ANWR ASAP Don’t they.
Forget the $100.00 that is window dressing for what the Repubs really want as we all know.
I hope Frist has to eat his shorts on this one.
Hopefully the Democrats will have the guts to call this for what it is… Prostitution.
“I don’t know what it is about the right that they completely lack any ability to appreciate humor, but they sure as shit can’t write it either”
Spend a jolly hour loitering at RedState or some similar site. They say the exact same thing about liberals. And they spend a lot of time congratulating each other and themselves for keepin’ it real and having a lighthearted attitude in contrast with those Lefties who are all sturm und drang and crabbiness.
I suppose one could argue that they are wrong and that, in some luminous region beyond the Cave, rightie humor is inferior to leftie humor. But you’ll need something more than simple assertion (no matter how assertive) to convince me.
Don’t get me wrong - I think Wolcott is hilarious and check his site way more often than is justified by his typical posting rate. But I just don’t buy this notion that Lefties are funnier than Righties.
peckniffery? omg, Jane, that is priceless! I have a feeling it is one of those words which will fly at warp speed through the internets!
In my fast-becoming-perpetual role of devil’s advocate, I have to disagree about them not being funny. Ever. If you added the word “intentionally” I’d have to fold, but I still think Bush’s “India and Pakistan are two different countries” said slowly and with hand gestures — was PDF! And I think of Condi’s “but would you have wanted a cup of coffee when Sadaam was in control of Iraq” with every 5th or 6th cup I drink.
Byron York, author of this piece on “ain’t torture grand” http://www.thehill.com/york/063004.aspx apparently becoming a twitchy, quivery mass of concern on Sunday morning c-span (I wish I could have seen it) with concern over the abuses suffered by Scooter (who he apparently carefully referred to as Lewis, bc nicknames are so mean) and Karl (who he carefully referred to as Carl, so as not to confuse the audience with references to Marx) at the hands of relentless prosecutor who beat them about the head, neck and shoulders with multipage pleadings.
It’s more a kick my iron knee than a tickle my fancy kind of funny, but I think we have to be fair and say they do elicit a laugh now and again.
Stephen Colbert is our man in Tienamen Square standing in front of those tanks!
Someone online recently posed the question, Where is the Chinese man who stood in front of that line of People’s Army tanks in Tienamen Square? - implying that we need him here in the USA now!
Well, look no further than Stephen Colbert. His act of courage at the White House Correspondents’ dinner was exactly that.
good article on Slate Magazine: The Roots of MayDay http://www.slate.com/id/2140846/fr/rss/
*ilson46201 says:
May 1st, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Please add Sir Edward Coke to your list in post 7:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Coke
Bravo! Bravo! All hail Stephen Colbert!
I can’t wait for TDS and Colbert Report. Regardless of how the msm have treated his brilliant performance, after tonite the whole world will know about it.
Alden:
Find me three genuinely funny righties that could compete with TBogg, The Poor Man, or James Wolcott. (And I’m even confining myself to Left Blogistan.)
I rest my case.
And Ann Coulter’s jokes about offing everyone she disagrees with are funny?
it’s merely a continuation of the reverse psychological warfare MO.
remember, in an up is down world, when they start bleating about how unfunny colbert was, its likely a good indication they’re quaking in their trousers bc they realize he nailed it (in more ways than one) to the massive delight of millions.
“All they are capable of is wavering between ham-fisted brutality and self-righteous pecksniffery.”
Talk about great writing, that’s it!
And Phoenix Woman at #11 has it exactly right about Colbert. He was “working the room” allright, but with the brilliance of using the room against itself while picking out the few among them (including the inimitable Helen Thomas)worth celebrating.
Bush was not funny because he was following orders. Listen to his voice; it is flat.
It was a real-life version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” staged smack dab in the middle of the royal court.
Having a sense of humor requires being able to laugh at yourself. The neocons and their various associates on the right take themselves very seriously. They may even enjoy feeling miserable - they certainly seem to think it’s their whole job in life to make the rest of us feel that way!
I cribbed my list of lawgivers from the walls of the U.S. Supreme Court Building. Sir Edward Coke sure sounds worthy of chiseling into that marble too!
Alden 22 — you come up with piece of humor from the right that is actually funny and then we may have something to talk about.
Yes, I know they think they’re a laugh ride. Just because they say they are doesn’t make it so.
OK, I’ll bite. I think P.J. O’rourke is pretty funny, though not sure he qualifies as a wingnut. He is a professed conservative.
As to Colbert, I’m glad they were uncomfortable, its a sign that some might still have a conscience.
Mary 24 — I absolutely stand corrected. The word “intentionally” most certainly belongs in there.
I can’t do that, Phoenix Woman, because I don’t find righties funny. Righties don’t find lefties funny, Lefties don’t find righties funny. Righties do find righties funny, Lefties do find lefties funny.
I think this says a lot more about the nature of humor than the nature of Lefties and Righties.
The only lack of symmetry is the relation of the humorist to power. Humor is intrinsically subversive and so it goes against its own grain when its used to heap scorn on the weak. I think you could make an interesting argument for the superiority of Leftie humor on that basis but that’s not the argument that was made in the original post.
“The beauty of Colbert’s delivery was the utterly pompous puffy hostility of the crowd facing him. The pearl clutching butt clenching expressions of the audience was the perfect foil for Colbert’s wit.” Amen, Carolyn.
What a bunch of pompous, overdressed, sour-faced people there were in that crowd. I loved it when C-span cut to them! They were completely blindsided by Colbert. I guess some people can’t take a joke.
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Colbert makes a joke out of people too self-important to get the joke who harumph that the joke wasn’t funny because they are too self-important to get the joke.
The Neocons pride themselves in their ignorance of history. Historically Colbert’s role was that of the court jester, who keeps the king from egotistical excesses. The jester has special dispensation to mock because of the role he fills in keeping he king human by holding up a mirror to the king. Being ignorant of history, the Neocons miss the opportunity to laugh at themselves in the mirror and thus become more human.
The exception that proves the rule is Justice Scalia, who whatever else you may say about him had the sense, and maybe even the grace, to be able to laugh at himself reflected in Colbert’s mirror.
The Neocons look into the mirror held up by Colbert and say “That’s ugly and it’s not funny.” And to the extent that he mirrors them, they are correct.
Alden 40 — The only lack of symmetry is the relation of the humorist to power. Humor is intrinsically subversive and so it goes against its own grain when its used to heap scorn on the weak. I think you could make an interesting argument for the superiority of Leftie humor on that basis but that’s not the argument that was made in the original post.
I get it. So this makes righties funny.
I’m in stitches right now just thinking about it. You’ve totally won me over.
Yeah, that Stephen Colbert paid the price alright! He got his own segment on Sunday’s 60 Minutes for a brilliant interview. I know he’s SUFFERING. Poor guy.
Michael Scherer at Slate delivers his kudos to Colbert http://www.salon.com/opinion/f.....=salon.rss
The funny thing is that Colbert let ‘em off easy.
Pecksniffery? I love it.
Colbert is courageous. There’s going to be more courage coming from the left. There certainly isn’t any coming from the Democratic Party.
alden, you might be a redneck…
Long time lurker, first time poster.
Great post Jane, and great job. I love FDL, it’s on my must read list.
As I read the Bumiller’s article on the subway, I thought that the Bush impersonater was the only act - forgot all about Colbert even though he had mentioned it on his show. After some reading of the blogs, I had to write a letter to editor. It’s be nice to be able to rely on my paper of record, but once more that ain’t the case. Doubt the letter will get any ink.
It’s amazing to see the right wing whining about how Colbert wasn’t funny because the crowd was silent, and the crowd was silent because he was attacking the dear leader. No, the crowd was silent because he was attacking them, this pathetic excuse for a press corp. And that’s exactly why they ignored Colbert and played up the chimp twins.
I hope that the play this is getting in FDL, Atrios, Froomkin, Billmon, et al gets through. Like my sighting of an ITMFA hat on the B68 bus Saturday, things do filter out into the crowd.
This was my favorite bit on the collection of blog quotes linked from the Froomkin post, from Respublica:
I find it hilarious that there are (or were) Republicans who liked Colbert’s show because, fundamentally, they don’t get it, and furthermore they don’t get that they don’t get it.
I wonder how many of the Republicans and their fellow travelers out there who are dissing Stephen Colbert for being mean and unpatriotic and so forth were as quick to condemn Don Imus when he ripped into Clinton during a White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner a few years ago?
I didn’t laugh once during Bush’s “Doppelganger moment”, and my 15-year old son and I were laughing out loud as Colbert stuck in and twisted the knife repeatedly.
I hope the cocktail weenies were delicious, because those Beltway Blowhards sure got bitch-slapped by Colbert.
if it wasn’t funny, it’s because of the reality of this administration’s actions. they have almost made parody obsolete.
The right is never funny because they are highly cynical (in the true sense of that word) and take nothing — nothing — seriously.
Larry #25
“Stephen Colbert is our man in Tienamen Square standing in front of those tanks!“
http://www.wolfblog.net/images/TSquare.jpg
Joke:
How many wingnuts does it take to bankrupt the worlds richest economy, destroy 200 years of democracy, and make the worlds most powerful nation into a detested and impotent laughingstock ?
A: That’s not funny.
“The Correspondents Dinner prides itself on making the evening a safe venue for all, and the humor is supposed to stay self-deprecating. Attacking one’s opponents in this forum is considered bad manners.”
Unless the President is Bill Clinton, and the “humorist” is Don Imus, and the “humor” isn’t particularly humorous or accurate.
“it didn’t keep with the spirit of the evening. The Correspondents Dinner prides itself on making the evening a safe venue for all, and the humor is supposed to stay self-deprecating. Attacking one’s opponents in this forum is considered bad manners.”
And National press it is also considered “BAD MANNERS” to abdicated your responsibility to the citizen’s of this nation by never asking thses dopes any questions, never following up on your ridiculous collegues questions, and being basically complict in a war that will ultimately rob all of our nations soul (not to mention money)
Jane - I just gotta say, you craft such very good prose day in and day out - wow!
just back from the big Chicago march - had to come to the office to get my laptop fixed and do some Ykos stuff so I couldn’t do the full day - and it was amazing … wonderful energy, happy people, proud people, even the cops were in good spirits - huge crowd and a great sense that people marching together for justice can win! I particularly loved seeing a very old gentleman, proudly mexican, chanting boldly while wearing a hands off iran button … el pueblo unido…!
A puzzling response, Jane.
I never suggested that righties were funny or funnier. Your sarcasm is misplaced. And if its not sarcasm, then I’m totally baffled. heh.
Well, anyhow, carry on.
hah! I knew we cound find some way to blame it on France (salon.com re Colbert - “The Truthiness Hurts”):
…In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery “détournement,” a word that roughly translates to “abduction” or “embezzlement.” It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. “Plagiarism is necessary,” wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. “Progress demands it. Staying close to an author’s phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas.”
But nearly half a century later, the ideas of the French, as evidenced by our “Freedom fries,” have not found a welcome reception in Washington. The city is still not ready for Colbert….
“…pecksniffery…”
This is why I come here (mostly lurking) everyday. It’s words like these, other snarks, and ‘wish-I’d-said-thats’ that keeps me coming back for more.
Terrific jab at the baffoons Jane.
siun: glad to see you made it to the Marcha! ‘cbl’ from here was going too. Indianapolis is quiet today - no ‘boicot’ organzing or marching here. is Pachacutec taking a day off from blogging to protest?
Of course you know that MayDay as International Labor Day started in Chicago…
Jane,
Billmon has a post about “The Joker in the Pack” with a hilarious mock-up of Frist as the Joker. It’s bound to prove a classic. You might want to save it for use as a header sometime.
punaise: I bet the French don’t have a word for chauvinism either!
Jane sez:
“I fear no one on the right. Ever. All they are capable of is…”
Funny thing about that. Pundits and bloggers may be harmless, but you always must keep this in perspective.
If this administration ever finds itself with its back against the wall… support down to sub-Nixon levels, a goner of an election, a Democratic Congress and indictments on the march… do you really think these people are just going to jump over the net and say, “Oh well, good game, old sport!”?
They’re not into losing, they do not intend to lose, they do not intend to give it all up, they do not intend to go to jail. If it meant martial law and the deaths of multitudes of Ameican citizens, would they destroy even the pretense of a free nation and kill their own people?
I’m not afraid to go on record to say you betcha, they’d do it in a heartbeat.
As for the “humor” of right vs. Left, of course the right isn’t funny. They’re as “funny” as the Nazis could have been… the Nazis being the wacky folks who brought you concentration camps. I might find it hard to schmooze at a national dinner with the people who turned my friends into soap. But that’s just me.
(And if you still think it’s possible for the right to grok wit: “Mallard Fillmore”. Thank you.)
But Jane, with regard to being “afraid of the right”, please be warned: it’s a whole new ballgame when you mock the evil king.
I can’t get the movie “V For Vendetta” out of my head, in which an immensely popular TV host takes the unheard-of step of performing a satirical skit on his program about the dictator. In “Benny Hill” fashion, he ridicules the tyrant and makes light of the oppression that’s weighing like a molasses cloud over the country. People first gasp at the danger; then they laugh and exhale, and we’re all human again, for a moment.
Then, the government’s goons break into the TV star’s home and beat him to death (while making comments along the lines of, “Laughing NOW, Funny Boy?”).
Oh give me a break, stupid W gets his ass handed to him. We’ve all been listening to his idiotic lunacy for 5 years. SC was simply the character he on the SC Report. Its like when John Stewart went on Crossfire, they were so surprised to hear somebody call them out on their hopelessly poor job. Telling the truth is exactly what comics do!
What did the fools in DC think SC would do, SC just told them what 1/2 the country thinks about this president and his pandering enablers. Bush got up there last year and made jokes about the failure to find WMDs in Iraq - a search operation that cost the lives of American soilders.
CNN is hyping an upcoming story on “The Situation Room” about how funny the Preznit was at the Dinner with his double! HA HA HA
Ted Turner weeps…
My gut feeling (note: I have no rational proof as I haven’t thought about it all that much) is that Someone knew exactly what s/he was doing when they booked Colbert for this shindig.
And I did notice that there was an awful lot of silent tittering going on in the audience behind dinner napkins and hands.
*ilson:
I’ve been mostly out of blogging today but doing other business, including my own, er, job.
Doing a lot of juggling these days!
Jane
self righteous pecksniffery
That phrase deserves a paypal donation.
beautiful writing, Jane. Hey Howie are you paying attention?
From think progress, here’s what the morning dodobirds on faux had to say:
>>>>>>
BRIAN KILMEADE: We’re also going to talk about what happened at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The inside story about the Steven Colbert speech: was it really over the line or is that just typical when the President goes to these Washington correspondents dinners?
STEVE DOOCY: [Referring to on-screen image] There you’ve got the dueling Dubyas. Stephen Colbert — I have been to twenty of them and he was over the line.
[snip]
KIRAN CHETRY: What I was wondering though, because we did show some clips and at times it looked like the President was not laughing. Do you think he was annoyed by that or he thought it was not funny?
DOOCY: He was playing a good sport as his body double was there. But shortly after that, the paid performer, Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report, took the stage and did about 15 minutes and it was very uncomfortable. Personally I felt like he went over the line. Today in Lloyd Grove’s column, he says that Colbert “bombed badly.†It was not very funny.
>>>>>
there it is– officially pronounced not funny to the remaining 32% of backwash.
Great writing Jane, as always.
The right always tries to dismiss the left by saying no one is listening or no one cares. I think an interesting case in point is what happened to The Dixie Chicks after the famous announcement about Bush.
The right tried to shut them down and drive them out of the bidness. The fact that they didn’t (and from what I’ve read elsewhere, not even at the time, outside of certain smallish markets) really says something about the true appeal of the right.
Shorter version: More people lean left than right.
*********
Don’t want you to think me a dweeb*, but for those who want to know:
Main Entry: Pecksniff
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: an extreme hypocrite
Etymology: a character in Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit
*dweeb ( P ) Pronunciation Key (dwb)
n. Slang
A person regarded as socially inept or foolish, often on account of being overly studious.
This is the part I don’t understand: Colbert was playing the character he is most famous for. What else did they expect? Who invites Steven Colbert to be the guest comedian at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and is then surprised when he makes the same kind of jokes he makes on his show 4 days a week?
I think anyone and anything that makes me laugh and the right squirm is pretty damn terrific. The hypocrisy of their complaining about Colbert’s riff, after having declared Bush’s “Where are the WMDs” schtick as funny is just astounding (oh,my, going to war on a false premise is just soooooo funny I can barely catch my breath. That Beavis-boy Bush - he’s just a funny, funny guy!).
We all know what the real problem is: the truth hurts.
Goopers didn’t think that Colbert was funny. They don’t think that today’s protests are funny either. Odd. They have no senses of the bizarre.
Illegal immigrants protesting for immigration “rights” is funny. Don’t know what’s wrong with goopers. I’ve been laughing my ass off about it all day!
Right on, Jane.
I have heard it said, and not inaccurately I might add, that to invote the wrath of James Wolcott in particular is to invite the death of a thousand cuts.
I will agree with the statement upthread, however, about how the right can be funny on occasion, but only when they themselves are the joke.
Ay the play’s the thing…and fellow of infinite jest Colbert remind’s me of the late great Clarence Darrow who lost his immediate audience at the Scopes Chimp…monkee trial but through the magic of radio won the national audience over to evolution. ( Well half the national audience )
Hearty cong-rats to the interzone’s very own Colbert - funny guy’s beat phoney guy’s everytime.
BTW, great and, as per usual, inpired choice of the Lenny Bruce pic for this post.
CNN had screenshots of mydd, Durang @ huffpo and the thank you SC site…remarks by the internet reporter that the site is new and has gone from 500 to over 11,000 entries today…
Great post. Humor can absolutely be used as a weapon.It breaks down defenses so as to get at the truth, and our side has it. I was overjoyed when Al Franken came out with his Air America show named “The O’Franken Factor” after Bill O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Factor.
To me it just let all the air out of the self-righteous puffery of Wing Pundits.
Colbert with Kristol? Perfect example.
“All in the Family” comes to mind as well- a show produced by a liberal- that was not only uproariously funny but revealed the humanity on BOTH SIDES of contentious issues of the day, and if ANY humanity can be exposed it is a force multiplier for our side because that brings people together. The right’s one-trick-pony is to push people apart.They do not and can not, as Al F. says: “bring the funny”.
Does anyone have a link to Bumiller saying “it was just too scary” to ask the administration tough questions before the war?
Blizted Wolf just reported the Bush “twin” bit was terrific - no mention of Corbert of course. Could someone explain to me why little man Blitzer & his Situation Room is still on the air?
amusingly, Ted Kennedy pointedly refused to actually come out and endorse Lieberman despite repeated efforts by Tweety… what a skillful politician!
Chisholm # 82
>>>>
BUMILLER: I think we were very deferential because…it’s live, it’s very intense, it’s frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you’re standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country’s about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh032504.shtml
Anne–Wolfie and Senior political reporter Candy Crowley are on the air cause they once witnessed sr. Mgmt. Fuckin goats.
Shorter Alden: To be funny, you have to kick up, not down. And that’s pretty much true.
Moreover, at least since “King Lear,” the role of the court jester (the “Fool” in that particular example) has been to tell the King the truth. The catch: Anyone else who tried to do it ended up in a world of hurt.
Jane you hit the nail on the head when you said that humor is based on the truth and that’s why the right is not funny. If you don’t realize the truth as it is, then nothing will appear funny.
Goopers can be funny I suppose- but not while in the act of performing wingnuttery- wingnuttery requires a certain facial expression- similar to one straining at a bowel movement- ever try to laugh while takin a dump?
Great post, Jane.
For those who don’t get the “pecksniffery” reference, I offer: http://search.sympatico.msn.ca.....cksniffery
There’s a post from FDL on that page as well.
*ilson46201 65
I bet the French don’t have a word for chauvinism either!
true story: W once derided the French economic system because, heck, they don’t even have a word for entrepreneur
“The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal”
From yesterday’s New York Times: “Peter Beinart is editor at large of The New Republic. This essay is adapted from “The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,” which will be published in late May by HarperCollins”
“…..The liberal story also finds its roots in the early cold war. If cold-war conservatism began with the founding of National Review, cold-war liberalism emerged slightly earlier, in 1947, when Niebuhr, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey and the United Auto Workers’ chief Walter Reuther, established Americans for Democratic Action. The A.D.A. was born amid a civil war on the American left, which pitted anti-Communists like Humphrey against Henry Wallace and those liberals who saw communism less as an enemy than as an ally. But by 1949, Wallace was vanquished, and the A.D.A. increasingly defined itself against the right.
The liberal story began with a different fear about America. If cold-war conservatives worried that Americans no longer saw their own virtue, cold-war liberals worried that Americans saw only their virtue. The A.D.A.’s most important intellectual — its equivalent of James Burnham — was the tall, German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a dedicated opponent of communism, but he was concerned that in pursuing a just cause, Americans would lose sight of their own capacity for injustice. “We must take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization,” he wrote. “We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized.” Americans, Niebuhr argued, should not emulate the absolute self-confidence of their enemies. They should not pretend that a country that countenanced McCarthyism and segregation was morally pure. Rather, they should cultivate enough self-doubt to ensure that unlike the Communists’, their idealism never degenerated into fanaticism. Open-mindedness, he argued, is not “a virtue of people who don’t believe anything. It is a virtue of people who know. . .that their beliefs are not absolutely true….”
Thanks rwcole - certainy explains everything!
The press thought that Colbert was shooting the messenger. He wasn’t. He was shooting the sidekick.
I think it emboldens the entire left side of the blogosphere, knowing that those on the right are completely incapable of coming back at them with anything other than unimpressive, humorless thuggery.
Damned skippy. I’m so emboldened I named my blog Emboldened (Don’t let the URL fool you, I’m telling the truth. With impunity.)
I won’t have time to read all the comments in this thread until later, but I just wanted to toss in this:
A lot of my work in grad school was focused on the total inability of any totalitarian regime (in the case of my work: the fascist flavor) to inspire anything to which the label of “art” could be affixed.
The justifications for thuggery never provide anything in the way of grist for the artist’s mill (whether painting, architecture, literature, theater, sculpture, etc. — or comedy) other than the full palette of deception and superficiality.
One of the main bits of research I did was the study of how the Nazis hijacked “biblical” and other “religious” themes and motifs for their “poets” to use — but these themes/motifs could only be put into place by totally upending their original (and traditional) meanings through the use of sneaky, sleight-of-hand rhetorical tricks.
The research I did back when on the culture of the Weimar Republic prepared me to react in horror to what I saw unfolding from the Bush camp in the year 2000 already.
That fascists have (and CAN have) no real sense of humor is thus not surprising. They only have the “humor” of jack-booted brownshirts kicking their victims when they’re already down.
Thanks to Jane for pointing out this essential insight. In our chaotic infotainment landscape, it’s a basic truth which is easy to miss for those suffering from aggravated attention deficit disorder.
[And as an aside, my favorite online analyst for the “culture” of neofascism is of course Neiwert. No one dissects this diseased part of the body politic in great detail like he can.)
Jane, did you really write that Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ dinner constituted a “historic moment?” Compared to what? The first shot at Fort Sumter? The appearance of the first Japanese plane over Pearl Harbor? The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? It was a dinner with some jokes amongst insiders… in short, no big deal.
Expressing something humorously doesn’t really mean much beyond the fact that someone chuckles for a moment. If it meant more than that, Johnny Carson would have been made emperor by general acclimation in 1967, the Algonquin Round Table would have been given the power of Constitutional review, and Soupy Sales would be Secretary of Labor.
When “the wits of the liberal blogosphere sit down behind their keyboards and start tapping out daggers, slicing up the right with eviscerating humor that cuts to the bone, they know full well they are going into battle with unarmed opponents,” all they’re doing is playing to the true believers and scoring a few yucks. They’re not in battle with unarmed opponents, they’re taking swings at windmills and congratulating themselves for their bravery.
Confronting power is all fine and dandy — and far more entertaining when done with wit and style. But that’s the easy part of democracy, not the brave part. The hard part is coming up with alternative agendas that attract voters and then going through the long, hard slog of enacting them in the compromised world of politics. All the Colberts, Wolcotts, TBoggs and Generals out there have nothing to do with that.
Since good humor is based on the truth, all the right has left to laugh at is slipping on banana peels and people getting hurt.
I just sent an email to CNN asking them why they haven’t mentioned Colbert’s performance. I doubt I will get a reply, I have never got a reply from CNN about anything.
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form1.html?39
WILSON coming up on tweety!!! will he mention COLERT???
Stewart/Colbert 2008!!
*ilson - waving! as the proud daughter of a proud union carpenter who taught me that Norman Thomas and the wobblies were the true heros of american history … you bet!
And today’s Chicago march started in Union Park and went past Haymarket Square before heading through the Loop to the park. I joined up in the Loop and had a glorious time … had to pop back here for a bit to pick up the infamous laptop and now I’m off to the Darfur rally at Fed Plaza which will be a very different tone.
There’s something about gazillions of folks, dancing in the streets for justice AHORA! that does the heart good …
John Pearley Huffman:
re: bravery
You are, I assume, writing from somewhere outside the Green Zone in Iraq?
JPH –
All the Colberts, Wolcotts, TBoggs and Generals out there have nothing to do with that.
That’s funny. I seem to remember hearing from numerous sources how absolutely essential subversive humor was to keeping up the morale of the public under the various totalitarian Soviet regimes.
OT - found this via ThinkProgress.com.
“The Secret Service has agreed to turn over White House visitor logs that will show how often convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff met with Bush administration officials — and with whom he met“
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200.....h_abramoff
OfT:Feingold heartens activists in Iowa with tough-talking attacks
Brad 74: Here’s what my older son (24 almost) said when I told him about Colbert’s rout: “You’re telling me they hired Steven Colbert…and didn’t KNOW that’s what he’d do?!”
John Pearley Huffman @ #97 quasi-poo-poos Colbert. There’s a grain of truth there in that Colbert et al in-and-of-itself will not effect change but he is indeed an ancillary in the broad general battle against tyranny. Culture is always helpful in the political struggle and must be cultivated!
flash! On Hardball, Schuster just said Valery Plame was part of a group investigating nuclear weapons in iran and that the revelation of her identity blew that operation……