America This Week, September 8, 2023: "Comedy is Not Pretty"

Interdimensional travel, basically. Wow, yeah, I keep predicting to you behind the scenes that this is the subject that is going to eat the American mind in the next six months. And I hope our listeners will hold me to that prediction because I'll stop talking about it if it isn't true.

If this isn't some kind of information OP, it's very clever and very clever.

In any subject that involves the fate of humankind, I should spend, I think, at least three weeks getting to the bottom of it.

Sort of a colleague who I've known for a long time, Bill Maher, somebody whose show I've been on many times, was in the news quite a bit. Gave an interview with Jim Gaffigan and said a very interesting thing. Which should allow us to talk about something that I think is dear to both of our hearts. The fate of comedy in the current generation. So let's listen first to what Bill Maher says to Gaffigan.

That's not a take. I mean, I'm not saying it's not sincere. I guess it is on their part, but even if it wasn't, that's what they would do. There's never a moment where you don't know exactly. Oh, this is the correct point of view.

You know any of the others? I always get them confused. People want to hear their takes, and Bill says they don't have takes, they just deliver what the audiences want to hear. Which, of course, is a common criticism of what we do in media these days, especially in political media. But he distinguishes what they do from what he does. He says his show is more predictable.

But basically, he says, what they do isn't comedy and isn't an art form. Walter, what was your reaction to this first? Among other things, that whole group of people has created a viral legend through a new podcast called Strikeforce 5, which is an entity in itself. But first, let's talk about Maher.

I'll confine myself to specifics at this point. Um, so I've also been on Maher and seen how his show operates. They patiently write a show over a week.

You get on there. Talk is pretty unrestricted among the guests. Maher, of course, has written his bits and his longer pieces. But to sum up my reaction, I think he's right, He's absolutely right.

Not just in that, his show does present an odd take. Which is the reason you get people mad at Bill Maher constantly? Because he's always betraying anyone who thinks that he's going to have a predictable line on um, uh, but uh.

The lack in the other group, which really is a group and he treated them as one and now they are treating themselves as one, is amazing.

OK, so I don't watch a lot of late night comedy anymore. I'm sometimes on their competitor, the Greg Gutfeld Show, which has succeeded. Chiefly because they represent a monolith and are easy to outflank, but especially on the right. But in any case, one night I was in a in a.

Laundromat during Russia. I think it was pre-Covid, I'm trying to remember which panic was, I can date it to. It was the rush.

And he was I from a distance, and seeing him in that sort of alienated frame, a menacing character. He, he, he was sort of machine gun style, spitting out these accepted propositions and position. And the audience seemed to be laughing out of fear as much as anything else. Fear that Colbert and his staff maybe had cameras on them, and would, you know, know who?

Who had not laughed? fear, maybe, of the person beside them for not having laughed as loud as that person. And there was actually nothing funny about it. The jokes have no shape as jokes, I.

They were just kind of notional.

Pokes, and.

You, you got the sense that Stephen Colbert's function was no longer to entertain or make anyone laugh, but to enforce a kind of drill sergeant cultural discipline, you know?

Where he said something and you had to say it louder, or.

Jump up, sit down.

And I went. This has really evolved since I was a kid. And, you know, I, because I think everybody's gold standard for this late night talk was Johnny Carson, who I remember making fun of. You know, every politician who came down the pipe, never thinking he was necessarily friends with them or behind any of them. Was Johnny Carson, a Nixon guy? was Johnny Carson a Jimmy Carter guy?

Was he a Reagan guy? I could never tell. Maybe it was gentler humor in certain ways, but it didn't seem like it was meant to keep you in line.

Sir, you attract more skinheads than free rogaine, you have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign language gorilla who got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin's holster.

Except this one is just raw messaging. There's no. There's no real jokes in any of it. And as you say the audience is, their reaction isn't really to the joke. It doesn't feel like it's more to something else. Very strange.

They're laughing in direct proportion to how worked up he's getting and how worked up they feel they should be. In response. You know now, you know, as someone who's penetrated the masonic secrets of late night talk and been on this Gutfeld show, you know, umpteen times. I can tell you that audiences are a strange thing. Sometimes they desert you. Your best lines, your best jokes, land with a thud.

But it seems on the Colbert Show, they're very well trained, they they don't, they don't ever disappoint. And and that's the way in which I think Stephen Colbert is a drill sergeant. He's so insistent on getting a response that I think, literally out of intimidation, the audience complies. Those jokes were seventh grade pun.

Dictator I mean, I could do better than that. He has actual writers, um cock holster.

Well, I don't know if that's street language, or if they invented that one, you know, in their long lunches at CBS. But none of it rank as far as I can tell. You know, it's famous because it's sort of memorable and burns an ugly hole in the brain, but.

Yeah, and so it's not surprising to me that Colbert Himmel Fallon The reason you got confused before was because it was two jimmies. Yeah, the two jimmies and they. They're like an elm tree that grows out of one root, you know, you're not sure are they two actual jimmies, or, you know?

One in one half, uh, so uh. The testimony to to what Mar says is that. All three of these guys, plus John Oliver and Seth Meyers, have combined in a podcast called Strike Force Five. To stay relevant during this Hollywood Writers strike, which has kept them off the air, uh, I mean, they're doing reruns, uh, which which shows you, which is another testimony to how kind of.

Dumb the shows are, uh, last week when I was on Gutfeld, I was talking in the Green room about. I was saying, what are what are Fallon and Colbert doing? And somebody looked it up on their phone. And they said, Tonight they're running, one's running a show from last January, and another is running a show for them.

Um, and I thought, Well, people probably can't tell, because I'm sure all the shows are about how much they hate Trump, um, how awful Vladimir Putin is, um.

In any case, Strike Force Five gets them all together on a podcast, and it's to benefit their writers, uh, who are now out on strike. And they divide the what I imagine are the rather meager proceeds from this Spotify broadcast to, uh, help their writers. And, oh, I'm all for that. I'm a writer's guild member who's on strike right now. But in any case, here they are all five of them, and can you imagine in any other entertainment setting, five people who are supposedly competitors? Or at least three of them are, you know, during the same time? Especially comics, Yeah, especially comics comics. The most misanthropic, you know, miserable, contentious, disagreeable group, jealous, jealous people on earth. Forming this kind of, you know, glee club, uh uh of of mutual admiration shows you that, in fact, they are not really that separate entity.

They're not really separate entity, they they perceive themselves to be part of a small mob. And, uh, there isn't a bit of disagreement between them on anything material. Uh, so it's a real, the show's a real admission, uh, of Bill Mars contention. That they don't, that they don't come up with anything that eccentric or individual they need people. A kind of a wafer, a pressed wafer of, uh, you know, normative thought.

You know, they can both, they can both be ridiculed, uh, safely, because all people are inherently ridiculous. And so in some moment, right? And that's that's sort of the at the end of the, at the end of the day. When you turn on late night TV, what you're getting is what you. What you once got was a subtle reminder that, you know, you don't have to take all this stuff that seriously. Uh, and then there was this weird moment in the history of late night comedy that, oddly enough, Colbert was part of. Which was when the Daily Show, UH, arrived in, you know, the during the Bush years. And that was when we there started to be news stories about how comedy was becoming a news source for people. Because the networks suck so badly. And, you know, had had performed so horribly during the WMD episode, during the coverage of the War, uh, and lots of other things.

And the appeal of both, Uh, Colbert's Show, the Colbert Report, and the Daily Show, was that they went after everybody. Uh, and it was a little bit unpredictable, uh, especially, especially Stewart's show, but I think that was also true of Colbert's show. I mean, he, he, he goofed on, uh, on everybody. But it was this idea that the the comedy show is now a little bit political. Um, then that's what why I found this transformation into what he is now, Uh, on CBS.

So bizarre, because it's the opposite of what he was on the Colbert report. At least, that that's the way it feels to me. Uh, do I? Am I perceiving that wrong? Walter or is? Has there been really been a change?

Um, so when Stewart came along? And as you say, I think he was largely a reaction to, for you know, to. To the kind of consensus notion, uh, around Bush that, you know, America was just right in all its wars, et cetera. Um, you suddenly had a feeling of air entering this, you know? Um, oh, there was some space between comedy and the news, uh, and the regular, um. And if you wanted to hear the kind of bland reverence, you could turn to the regular news. But if you wanted to see anything critically, you turn to John Stewart. And in that sense, he was more than comedy, but comedy is always more than comedy. It has been in this country since. Mark Twain, I think, defined America as the place that could, for the first time in history, make fun of power, uh, and especially entrenched traditional power.

Um, and uh, so.

And and he, really, he believed it, he, he forced you into a I don't know what, what it felt like at the time. But even in the seventies, when I started reading Twain, because books by him were still coming out. Collections of, uh, of papers and essays that had not appeared during his lifetime were still best sellers in the sixties. Um, because, as I say, it had been so vicious that it hadn't appeared often during his lifetime anyway. Um, when I saw, uh, Colbert, leave what is essentially a Twainian enterprise. On on the Uh, Jon Stewart show, Comedy Central and Comedy Central. And become, uh, a courtier, you know, uh, a. a. A court jester, but not even a court jester. Because jesters made fun of the king, you know, jesters gave the audience a chance to laugh at the overweening power that they usually had to, um uh, placate. But he became a kind of adjunct, uh, you know, uh, because not only was he making, you know, a certain kind of fun of Trump. He now, under the Biden administration, and since Trump, has become, you know, uh, a person who gets people to take their vaccines by doing the worst.

What I think is probably the worst bit ever on late night TV. Um, in which, uh, you know, to the sound of the to the tune tequila, um, uh, or whatever it was. Uh, a bunch of dancing, hypodermic needles, um, came out, came out into the audience and kind of scared, scared old ladies. He danced with one of them. Um, you're like, Stephen Colbert is the UM comic enforcement arm of the regime, uh, the Department of comedy, Uh, has, you know, a head, and his name is Stephen Colbert.

You know, he, he's not to me quite as bright or as sharp as Colbert. And and he doesn't have that sort of sophisticated, uh, cocktail party men that Colbert has. You know, Colbert often looks like he walked out of a New Yorker cartoon.

And then there's Fallon. I've done way too much, uh, thinking about the sort of, um, you know, fine distinctions between these three, and then there's Fallon. Who? Who goes back to some sort of dinner theater idea of being a little bit sloshed and doing funny songs, and, uh, being a clown himself, being kind of hapless.

He's infused with a sense of justice and it's. It's really hard to see the former host of The Man show, Um, coming out as some avatar of right thinking. But he does. But I don't know how they brainwash these guys.

Um, totally gratuitous, uh, but at least it was. It was some kind of performance, which is what you know, Colbert is is is just sort of stick this, you know, I order you to laugh now. Uh, you know you, you will. You have heard the gospel at this time for you too.

And that Bill Maher exists is that they are so constrained by their devotion to, you know, social justice, openness, whatever you call it, that all they can really do is.

Create this in crowd sense of, uh, of outrage over this supposed out crowd, in other words.

Colbert and Kimmel and Fallon To some extent, though, Fallon, you just feel is uncomfortable with politics. And would, you know, love to be doing Dean Martin drunk jokes and singing funny songs?

They just posed as kind of a certain kind of party crowd that went to Caesars a lot. And you, you imagined, hung out afterwards at, you know, big steak restaurants or something. Um, but uh, but. But these guys are suggesting that there's a kind of menacing, stupid, uh, Neanderthal America out there that they are holding, uh, you know, holding the line.

There was Alpha, then Delta, then Omicron next.

1 0.

5.

Um, but that's that's about as much as you can do. It's like there's a. There's some room to have some fun within these tiny little parameters, but it can't have any edge to it. Uh, you know, unlike, I mean, South Park still still has does stuff that's very funny and very edgy, uh, and part of what's funny about it is that it doesn't adhere to the pieties.

But if you were on one of those shows, it's nothing but pieties.

Listening to that, it attempted comedy in that it was trying to satirize the fine gradations of of variant. Uh, that that were coming out, you know, it was, it was genuine.

Um, uh, because, because if I was going to write a routine around, uh, you know, the increasingly preposterous names for the Covid variants and so on, uh, I W. I would have gone a lot further. You know, I would have, um, maybe gotten into Fauci and other bureaucrats. And the way they that it did, they do, uh, did they do a Fauci? He was the most ripe for satire guy that's come down the pipe in American history. You know, um, I would have had skits every night, you know Dr. Fauci's bedtime stories?

Um.