I understand that he has to try and appeal to the widest possible audience, and most Americans don't want their post-news fall-asleep hour to be too edgy, outrageous or exciting. But, Jay Leno is just such an unfunny, fawning simp. He wasn't funny even before he had a TV show, when he was free to appeal to any audience he chose.
I disagree about that; there was a time when Jay Leno was coming up in the '80s and was doing Letterman a lot that I thought he was the funniest man in America. However, I think the treadmill of doing the Tonight show night after night has smoothed him out, not that he had that many rough edges in the first place. Men with rough edges don't get network talk shows interviewing sitcom stars.
But more importantly, I agree with Lons' broader point, which is about
not just Jay Leno, but a lot of political comedians of his ilk. I think that sometimes, they take real problems and issues and make them frivolous. I think that sometimes, genuine and truthful observations about our world are turned too quickly into just another cliched punchline.
Bill Maher, to me, would be more chiefly guilty of this today, but that's a matter of opinion. But this is something that I've been thinking about for a while as well. As much as I've loved & love some political comedians from A. Whitney Brown to the late, great Bill Hicks, I also remember what Peter Cook used to say: The peak of satire was 1930's Berlin--and look how much that did to prevent the rise of Hitler.
What bothers me sometimes about political comedy is that it seems to be a way of letting off steam about things that we all know are true--but that nobody's doing anything about. Like, get this...
2,061 Americans have died in Iraq...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...because our president is a liar...ha ha ha ha ha ha....
4 comments:
You should watch Canadian shows like the Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes or Rick Mercer's Monday Report if you want real political satire. The only trouble is, it's Canadian in content, not American.
We do at least have Doonesbury and The Daily Show, both of which I think are real political satire.
And in their day both have augmented, and in some frightening cases replaced, the way Americans get their information.
It's true that The Daily Show (in particular) does tend to replace and disseminate political information for its audience. It's why they're usually able to get different members of your government and "traditional" media on the show. I find that, however, a sad commentary on American society: even in sharp satire, the audience is being spoon-fed information they're too lazy and/or uninterested in find out for themselves. I won't say we don't have some of that up here, but if you don't already know what's going on, a show like Royal Canadian Air Farce can be difficult to follow sometimes. Oh, it's still funny, but you might not catch everything.
Thanks for the link. (Oh, and I'm a guy).
I purposefully made a distinction between something like The Daily Show or the comedy of Bill Hicks and stuff like Leno. As a wannabe comedy writer myself, I have nothing but respect for political satire (and I include the Royal Canadian Air Farce in here).
I just think that in the case of "The Tonight Show" or, for sure, Bill Maher's comedy, what those guys do is turn the genuinely important news of the day into just another dumb Lindsay Lohan joke. They cheapen the discourse...and it's cheap enough already.
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