Tag Archives: satire

The Post-Stewart Apocalypse

Jon-Stewart

Our planet continues to orbit its home star. The cosmos has yet to collapse into a galactic-sized blackhole. But, don’t be fooled. The apocalypse is here. It has indeed arrived. Today is August 7, 2015 or 1 PS.

We are now one day into the PS era, that’s PS for Post-Stewart — Jon Stewart, that is. So, as we enter this uncharted period — a contemporary Dark Ages — I will mourn Jon Stewart’s passing and yet curse him for leaving The Daily Show before his projected death of natural causes in 2065.

However, I am reminded that his arch-enemy Faux News will continue to amaze and entertain those of us who search for truth in the dumbed-down, fear-mongering drivel that it pumps through our nation’s cables. The channel’s puppet-master, and chief propagandist, Roger Ailes had this to say of Stewart,

“He’s feeling unrewarded because Fox News beats him on the amount of money we make, on ratings and on popularity. I’m sure it’s very depressing when he sits home at night and worries about it. We never did.”

This is so wonderfully hilarious, for Mr. Ailes fails to notice that he’s comparing his vast “news” media empire to a mere comedy show. I suppose I can take solace from this quote — who needs Jon Stewart when the target of his ire can do such a preeminent job of skewering itself.

Bye Jon, I hope you find several suitable Moments of Zen! But, you’re still a bastard.

Image courtesy of Google Search / The Daily Show.

PowerPoint Karaoke Olympics

PPT-karaokeIt may not be beyond the realm of fantasy to imagine a day in the not too distant future when PowerPoint Karaoke features as an olympic sport. Ugh!

Without a doubt karaoke has set human culture back at least a thousand years (thanks Japan). And, Powerpoint has singlehandedly dealt killer blows to creativity, deep thought and literary progress (thanks Microsoft). Surely, combining these two banes of modern society into a competitive event is the stuff of true horror. But, this hasn’t stopped the activity from becoming a burgeoning improv phenomenon for corporate hacks — validating the trend in which humans continue making fools of themselves. After all, it must be big — and there’s probably money in it — if the WSJ is reporting on it.

Nonetheless,

  • Count
  • me
  • out!

From the WSJ:

On a sunny Friday afternoon earlier this month, about 100 employees of Adobe Systems Inc. filed expectantly into an auditorium to watch PowerPoint presentations.

“I am really thrilled to be here today,” began Kimberley Chambers, a 37-year-old communications manager for the software company, as she nervously clutched a microphone. “I want to talk you through…my experience with whales, in both my personal and professional life.”

Co-workers giggled. Ms. Chambers glanced behind her, where a PowerPoint slide displayed four ink sketches of bare-chested male torsos, each with a distinct pattern of chest hair. The giggles became guffaws. “What you might not know,” she continued, “is that whales can be uniquely identified by a number of different characteristics, not the least of which is body hair.”

Ms. Chambers, sporting a black blazer and her employee ID badge, hadn’t seen this slide in advance, nor the five others that popped up as she clicked her remote control. To accompany the slides, she gave a nine-minute impromptu talk about whales, a topic she was handed 30 seconds earlier.

Forums like this at Adobe, called “PowerPoint karaoke” or “battle decks,” are cropping up as a way for office workers of the world to mock an oppressor, the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation. The mix of improvised comedy and corporate-culture takedown is based on a simple notion: Many PowerPoint presentations are unintentional parody already, so why not go all the way?

Library associations in Texas and California held PowerPoint karaoke sessions at their annual conferences. At a Wal-Mart StoresInc. event last year, workers gave fake talks based on real slides from a meatpacking supplier. Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Dick Costolo, armed with his training from comedy troupe Second City, has faced off with employees at “battle decks” contests during company meetings.

One veteran corporate satirist gives these events a thumbs up. “Riffing off of PowerPoints without knowing what your next slide is going to be? The humorist in me says it’s kinda brilliant,” said “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, who has spent 26 years training his jaundiced eye on office work. “I assume this game requires drinking?” he asked. (Drinking is technically not required, but it is common.)

Mr. Adams, who worked for years at a bank and at a telephone company, said PowerPoint is popular because it offers a rare dose of autonomy in cubicle culture. But it often bores, because creators lose sight of their mission. “If you just look at a page and drag things around and play with fonts, you think you’re a genius and you’re in full control of your world,” he said.

At a February PowerPoint karaoke show in San Francisco, contestants were given pairings of topics and slides ranging from a self-help seminar for people who abuse Amazon Prime, with slides including a dog balancing a stack of pancakes on its nose, to a sermon on “Fifty Shades of Grey,” with slides including a pyramid dotted with blocks of numbers. Another had to explain the dating app Tinder to aliens invading the Earth, accompanied by a slide of old floppy disk drives, among other things.

Read and sing-a-long to the entire article here.

Why Are Most Satirists Liberal?

Stephen_Colbert_2014Oliver Morrison over at The Atlantic has a tremendous article that ponders the comedic divide that spans our political landscape. Why, he asks, do most political satirists identify with left-of-center thought? And, why are the majority of radio talk show hosts right-wing? Why is there no right-wing Stephen Colbert, and why no leftie Rush? These are very interesting questions.

You’ll find some surprising answers, which go beyond the Liberal stereotype of the humorless Republican with no grasp of satire or irony.

From the Atlantic:

Soon after Jon Stewart arrived at The Daily Show in 1999, the world around him began to change. First, George W. Bush moved into the White House. Then came 9/11, and YouTube, and the advent of viral videos. Over the years, Stewart and his cohort mastered the very difficult task of sorting through all the news quickly and turning it around into biting, relevant satire that worked both for television and the Internet.

Now, as Stewart prepares to leave the show, the brand of comedy he helped invent is stronger than ever. Stephen Colbert is getting ready to bring his deadpan smirk to The Late Show. Bill Maher is continuing to provoke pundits and politicians with his blunt punch lines. John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is about to celebrate the end of a wildly popular first year. Stewart has yet to announce his post-Daily Show plans, but even if he retires, the genre seems more than capable of carrying on without him.

Stewart, Colbert, Maher, Oliver and co. belong to a type of late-night satire that’s typically characterized as liberal, skewering Republicans (and, less frequently, Democrats) for absurd statements or pompousness or flagrant hypocrisy. “The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Funny Or Die, and The Onion, while not partisan organs, all clearly have a left-of-center orientation,” wrote Jonathan Chait in The New Republic in 2011.This categorization, though, begs the question of why the form has no equal on the other side of the ideological spectrum. Some self-identified conservative comics argue that the biased liberal media hasn’t given them a chance to thrive. Others point out that Obama is a more difficult target than his Republican predecessor: He was the first African-American president, which meant comedians have had to tip-toe around anything with racial connotations, and his restrained personality has made him difficult to parody.

But six years in, Obama’s party has been thoroughly trounced in the midterms and publicly excoriated by right-wing politicians, yet there’s a dearth of conservative satirists taking aim, even though the niche-targeted structure of cable media today should make it relatively easy for them to find an audience. After all, it would have been difficult for Stewart or Colbert to find an audience during the era when three broadcast stations competed for the entire country and couldn’t afford to alienate too many viewers. But cable TV news programs need only find a niche viewership. Why then, hasn’t a conservative Daily Show found its own place on Fox?

Liberal satirists are certainly having no trouble making light of liberal institutions and societies. Portlandia is about to enter its fifth season skewering the kinds of liberals who don’t understand that eco-terrorismand militant feminism may not be as politically effective as they think. Jon Stewart has had success poking fun at Obama’s policies. And Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University, has found that the liberal Clinton was the butt of more jokes on late-night shows of the 1990s than either George W. Bush or Obama would later be.

So if liberals are such vulnerable targets for humor, why do relatively few conservative comedians seem to be taking aim at them?

ne explanation is simply that proportionately fewer people with broadly conservative sensibilities choose to become comedians. Just as liberals dominate academia, journalism, and other writing professions, there are nearly three times as many liberal- as conservative-minded people in the creative arts according to a recent study. Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University, argues that the same personality traits that shape political preferences also guide the choice of professions. These tendencies just get more pronounced in the case of comedy, which usually requires years of irregular income, late hours, and travel, as well as a certain tolerance for crudeness and heckling.

There are, of course, high-profile conservative comedians in America, such as the members of the Blue  Collar Comedy Tour. But these performers, who include Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy, tend carefully to avoid politicized topics, mocking so-called “rednecks” in the same spirit as Borscht Belt acts mocked Jewish culture.

When it comes to actual political satire, one of the most well-known figures nationally is Dennis Miller, a former Saturday Night Live cast member who now has a weekly segment on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor. On a recent show, O’Reilly brought up the Democrats’ election losses, and Miller took the bait. “I think liberalism is like a nude beach,” Miller said. “It’s better off in your mind than actually going there.” His jokes are sometimes amusing, but they tend to be grounded in vague ideologies, not the attentive criticism to the news of the day that has given liberal satires plenty of fodder five days a week. The real problem, Frank Rich wrote about Miller, “is that his tone has become preachy. He too often seems a pundit first and a comic second.”

The Flipside, a more recent attempt at conservative satire, was launched this year by Kfir Alfia, who got his start in political performance a decade ago when he joined the Protest Warriors, a conservative group that counter-demonstrated at anti-war protests. The Flipside started airing this fall in more than 200 stations across the country, but its growth is hampered by its small budget, according to The Flipside’s producer, Rodney Lee Connover, who said he has to work 10 times as hard because his show has 10 times fewer resources than the liberal shows supported by cable networks.

Connover was a writer along with Miller on The 1/2 Hour News Hour, the first major attempt to create a conservative counterpart to The Daily Showin 2007. It was cancelled after just 13 episodes and has remained the worst-rated show of all time on Metacritic. It was widely panned by critics who complained that it was trying to be political first and funny second, so the jokes were unsurprising and flat.

The host of The Flipside, Michael Loftus, says he’s doing the same thing as Jon Stewart, just with some conservative window-dressing. Wearing jeans, Loftus stands and delivers his jokes on a set that looks like the set of Tool Time, the fictional home-improvement show Tim Allen hosts on the sitcom Home Improvement: The walls are decorated with a dartboard, a “Men at Work” sign, and various other items the producers might expect to find in a typical American garage. In a recent episode, after Republicans won the Senate, Loftus sang the song, “Looks like we made it …” to celebrate the victory.

But rather than talking about the news, as Colbert and Stewart do, or deconstructing a big political issue, as Oliver does, Loftus frequently makes dated references without offering new context to freshen them up. “What’s the deal with Harry Reid?” he asked in a recent episode. “You either hate him or you hate him, am I right? The man is in the business of telling people how greedy they are, and how they don’t pay their fair share, and he lives in the Ritz Carlton … This guy is literally Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.” Much of his material seems designed to resonate with only the most ardent Fox News viewers. Loftus obviously can’t yet attract the kinds of celebrity guests his network competitors can. But instead of playing games with the guests he can get, he asks softball questions that simply allow them to spout off.

Greg Gutfeld, the host of Fox’s Red Eye, can also be funny, but his willing-to-be-controversial style often comes across as more hackneyed than insightful. “You know you’re getting close to the truth when someone is calling you a racist,” he once said. Gutfeld has also railed against “greenie” leftists who shop at Whole Foods, tolerance, and football players who are openly gay. Gutfeld’s shtick works okay during its 3 a.m. timeslot, but a recent controversy over sexist jokes about a female fighter pilot highlighted just how far his humor is from working in prime time.

So if conservatives have yet to produce their own Jon Stewart, it could be the relatively small number of working conservative comedians, or their lack of power in the entertainment industry. Or it could be that shows like The Flipside are failing at least, in part, because they’re just not that funny. But what is it about political satire that makes it so hard for conservatives to get it right?

Read the entire article here.

Image: Stephen Colbert at the 2014 MontClair Film Festival. Courtesy of the 2014 MontClair Film Festival.

Truthiness 101

Strangely and ironically it takes a satirist to tell the truth, and of course, academics now study the phenomenon.

[div class=attrib]From Washington Post:[end-div]

Nation, our so-called universities are in big trouble, and not just because attending one of them leaves you with more debt than the Greek government. No, we’re talking about something even more unsettling: the academic world’s obsession with Stephen Colbert.

Last we checked, Colbert was a mere TV comedian, or a satirist if you want to get fancy about it. (And, of course, being college professors, they do.) He’s a TV star, like Donald Trump, only less of a caricature.

Yet ever since Colbert’s show, “The Colbert Report,” began airing on Comedy Central in 2005, these ivory-tower eggheads have been devoting themselves to studying all things Colbertian. They’ve sliced and diced his comic stylings more ways than a Ginsu knife. Every academic discipline — well, among the liberal arts, at least — seems to want a piece of him. Political science. Journalism. Philosophy. Race relations. Communications studies. Theology. Linguistics. Rhetoric.

There are dozens of scholarly articles, monographs, treatises and essays about Colbert, as well as books of scholarly articles, monographs and essays. A University of Oklahoma student even earned her doctorate last year by examining him and his “Daily Show” running mate Jon Stewart. It was called “Political Humor and Third-Person Perception.”

The academic cult of Colbert (or is it “the cul of Colbert”?) is everywhere. Here’s a small sample. Jim .?.?.

?“Is Stephen Colbert America’s Socrates?,” chapter heading in “Stephen Colbert and Philosophy: I Am Philosophy (And So Can You!),” published by Open Court, 2009.

?“The Wørd Made Fresh: A Theological Exploration of Stephen Colbert,” published in Concepts (“an interdisciplinary journal of graduate studies”), Villanova University, 2010.

?“It’s All About Meme: The Art of the Interview and the Insatiable Ego of the Colbert Bump,” chapter heading in “The Stewart/Colbert Effect: Essays on the Real Impacts of Fake News,” published by McFarland Press, 2011.

?“The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report,” a 2009 study in the International Journal of Press/Politics that its authors described as an investigation of “biased message processing” and “the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert.” After much study, the authors found “no significant difference between [conservatives and liberals] in thinking Colbert was funny.”

Colbert-ism has insinuated itself into the undergraduate curriculum, too.

Boston University has offered a seminar called “The Colbert Report: American Satire” for the past two years, which explores Colbert’s use of “syllogism, logical fallacy, burlesque, and travesty,” as lecturer Michael Rodriguez described it on the school’s Web site.

This fall, Towson University will roll out a freshman seminar on politics and popular culture, with Colbert as its focus.

All this for a guy who would undoubtedly mock-celebrate the serious study of himself.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class-attrib]Image: Colbert Report. Courtesy of Business Insider / Comedy Central.[end-div]