Category: Humor

The difference between me and Jon Stewart

~ susie

Is that he got paid well to watch right-wing news all these years and can afford to walk away. If I could say that, I’d be gone. Because this work does erode the soul:

And that is why the last show that Stewart did before taking his break was so revealing. On that show he went after Donald Trump, pointing out the stupidity and arrogance of his remarks about Mexican immigrants. He then did a classic Stewart move and followed up his satire of a politician’s idiotic behavior with more satire of the idiotic media coverage of the idiotic politician.  Stewart pointed out all of the insanity of Trump and of Fox News’ adoration of Trump.  He joked that Trump has been there for him all along and that he was sure “the Donald” would give him more than enough material to finish out his show.  He went after the “buzzword, fucking bullshit” spewed by Ted Cruz as he tried to blame “the p.c. crowd” for misunderstanding Trump’s concern for the border.  He was sharp and insightful and fun and engaging.

But then came the moment of reckoning.  As he wound down the bit he exclaimed: “There is one good thing to come out of this. The farce of his candidacy is finally exposed. His unseriousness on display for all people and voters to see.  And the results will be obvious.”  He then cut to coverage that shows Trump polling at second place nationally and second place in Iowa and New Hampshire. A dejected Stewart looks down at his desk and simply mutters “fuck me.”

That “fuck me” resonates with all of us that are tired of watching Fox News and exhausted by covering GOP politics while their discourse becomes more extreme, more delusional and more dangerous.  Now we can hope that their rhetoric represents a relatively small—but extremely loud—segment of society.  And we can take refuge in the reality that smart coverage of these issues—especially when it takes the form of satire–can have a powerful impact on those of us with access to critical reasoning skills. But we can’t ignore the real fatigue that sets in when neither the truth, nor reason, nor irony seems to make absolutely no difference to those who need to hear us most.

Stewart will go down in U.S. history as one of the most important satirists of all time. He changed news media, he rallied the public, and he offered a vision of citizenship that was engaged and entertaining. He made political satire not just a take on the news, but a source of the news. His real commitment to democratic ideals and equal rights made his satire seem well-meaning and inspired, rather than malicious and caustic.  As he claimed in the Guardian interview, stepping down as host does not mean giving up his interest in politics:

Whether it’s standup, the show, books or films, I consider all this just different vehicles to continue a conversation about what it means to be a democratic nation, and to have it written into the constitution that all men are created equal – but to live with that for 100 years with slaves. How do those contradictions play themselves out? And how do we honestly assess our failings and move forward with integrity?

It is hard to imagine how we can “assess our failings and move forward with integrity” without going after Fox News and the GOP.  It’s even harder to imagine what this election cycle will be like without Stewart.  I understand his fatigue, but seeing him go feels like watching our star player give up while the bullies take over the field.

Stephen Colbert does Trump

~ susie

It just gets better:

Donald Trump‘s big presidential announcement Tuesday was made a little bigger with help from paid actors — at $50 a pop.

New York-based Extra Mile Casting sent an email last Friday to its client list of background actors, seeking extras to beef up attendance at Trump’s event.

“We are looking to cast people for the event to wear t-shirts and carry signs and help cheer him in support of his announcement,” reads the June 12 email, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “We understand this is not a traditional ‘background job,’ but we believe acting comes in all forms and this is inclusive of that school of thought.” (Read the full email at the bottom of the post.)

The pay was listed as $50 for fewer than three hours of work. According to the email, Extra Mile was reaching out to potential extras in partnership with Gotham Government Relations and Communications, a New York-Based political consulting group that has worked with Trump in the past. Gotham GR had no comment.

Suspicions that the event had hired extras came to light Wednesday when anti-Trump activist Angelo Carusone came across an Instagram photo, showing a man he recognized as a background actor posing at the Trump event. Carusone screengrabbed the photo of the actor, Domenico Del Giacco, and published it in a blog post. Del Giacco has since deleted the account. The photo shows him with a woman, identified in the now-deleted Instagram post as actress Courtney Klotz.

Cynical coda of ‘Mad Men’ finale: Coke is the real thing

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

An acquaintance of mine posted this question on Facebook last week: “Does anybody else find Mad Men‘s writing to be vapid, direction glacial, acting somnambulatory, and the cultural references boring?”

I asked my friend Swamp Rabbit if he’d like to respond, knowing he’d had plenty of time to watch TV while in rehab these past few months. “You jokin’ me?” he said. “I got a life, Odd Man. Got no time for TV.”

So I posted an answer of my own: Yes, I suspect most discerning viewers who followed Mad Men noticed that some of the plotting sagged and that many of writers’ references to the cultural milieu of the 1960s were laughably superficial.

So what? TV is a diversion. The most you can hope for in a TV series — in this case, a TV serial — is writing that’s good enough to occasionally generate scenes that illuminate the human condition. The same is true of most long novels. Viewers will encounter a lot of filler, no matter how good the writing, but they continue watching a serial for the same reason readers persevere with a long novel. They become emotionally invested. They stick around for the story-telling and, in particular, to witness how their favorite characters behave at critical moments.

I didn’t watch all of Mad Men, not by a long shot, but I was a fan. The show had an unusually charismatic lead character — Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm — a quirky supporting cast, and a thoughtful head writer, Matthew Weiner, who focused on the world of commercial advertising to dramatize the socio-economic forces that metastasized into contemporary American culture, such as it is.

Weiner and his co-writers juggled a lot of sub-plots, some compelling and some not so much, and they seemed in early episodes of the final season to know how to successfully resolve most of them. But give Weiner a lot of credit for how he handled what looked like the total crackup of his enigmatic anti-hero. In the final show’s final scene, Don Draper, after hitting bottom, is shown having an epiphany while chanting “Om” in a meditation group at some New Age-y spiritual retreat. His epiphany involves conceiving what will become a famously insipid TV commercial (circa 1971) that uses touchy-feely cliches to sell Coca-Cola, “the real thing.” Mad Men ends with the showing of the actual TV commercial.

I’d thought Don might kill himself or be killed in some sordid way, or maybe even to find redemption in a good cause. Instead, he is reborn as a sleazier version of his former self, selling a nutritionally empty icon of a spiritually bankrupt culture. The real thing.

Not bad for a TV show.