Monday, January 26, 2004

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan parses David Kay's report on the elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Quick summary: Back when Kay was still reporting to the Bush administration, he said there were no weapons but did so in the manner least likely to displease the Oval Office. Now that he doesn't report to them, he's a little more candid.

• Posted at 4:10 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's a short but interesting interview with George Carlin.

• Posted at 3:41 PM · LINK

Miller Time

Some people think most comedians are liberal because they go after rich people and those in power. I don't think it's usually a matter of politics. It's just the nature of comedy to deflate the privileged and the powerful. It was the Marx Brothers tormenting Margaret Dumont, not the other way around. Lately, Dennis Miller seems to be trying to reverse this principle.

I used to really like Miller, though not all the time. One of the "not" times came after I saw him perform years ago at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Rita Rudner was the opening act and she was funny and fresh and giving it her all. Miller came out next and did horribly dated "topical" material — nothing I hadn't heard him do a dozen times — with an attitude of, "Gimme my check and let me get out of here." Gauging the size of that check based on the price of the tickets, I expected a tad more effort. Later on, I warmed to him on the first season of his HBO show but thereafter lost interest. A lot of his "targets" seemed easy, a lot of his beefs seemed trivial and forced. After 9/11 when he became a cheerleader for George W. Bush, a lot of folks seemed to have changed their opinions of the guy, some for the better, some not. Long before then, I'd stopped setting the TiVo for his appearances.

Recently, he announced that on his new CNBC show, he'll be "giving Bush a pass," meaning little or no criticism. On the one hand, I think it's ignominious for any comedian who deals in current events to declare the President (any President) off-limits. It's like the Bizarro Don Rickles saying, "I don't pick on the big guys...only on the little guys." On the other hand, all comics have their personal no-fly zones and it's almost refreshing to hear one admit it out loud.

What struck me when I saw Miller on with Leno the other night was that given the state of the world right now, a comic who decides to not joke about the President really hasn't got a lot to say. He started his Tonight Show spot by hauling out his joke about Michael Jackson and George Hamilton officially crossing on the pigmentation chart. It's a joke that has now been rerun more often than the I Love Lucy about John Wayne's footprints and one that really shows its age. I suspect that were it not for Miller and that joke, George Hamilton would not have been mentioned on network television in the last decade.

The rest of Miller's spot consisted of generic insults about the Democratic contenders all being morons. I'm guessing that works well in his stand-up appearances because he's attracting the kind of audience that just wants to hear someone bash liberals and Democrats and Clintons. Mainstream appeal requires a little more substance. I am all for ridiculing politicians, even those I may vote for, but the jokes ought to make some sort of point other than, "He's a jerk." These were for the most part, the kind of jokes you do at a roast when you really don't know anything about the Guest of Honor. You just take a line about someone being a putz and stick the guy's name into it: "I wouldn't say [name of target] is dumb but they asked him about Red China and he said, 'It goes nice on a white tablecloth.'" That wasn't one of Miller's lines but it almost could have been. By contrast, both Conan O'Brien and Jon Stewart have recently had some strong, non-generic material about Kerry, Clark, Kucinich, etc.

Miller's new CNBC show will probably fail, not because it won't be good but because it has a fatal flaw: It's on CNBC. If it has any chance at all, it will come because Miller manages better comedy than he's been offering lately. That's possible, of course, even given the handicap of declaring the President off-limits for satire. But it's going to require having something funnier to say about the other guys than that they're scumbags because they're not George W. Bush.

• Posted at 3:10 PM · LINK

My Endorsement

I've finally found a candidate for President I can support. Read his platform and check out that all-important endorsement.

• Posted at 10:07 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here are two interesting articles, both Bush-related, in the current New Yorker. In this one, Hendrik Hertzberg discusses the State of the Union address and notes some of the same missing words that I noted here. And in this one, Joshua Micah Marshall discusses the concept of the American Empire. None of this, of course, is as important as the announcement I just posted...

• Posted at 2:07 AM · LINK