September 9, 2015--Take My Husband, Please

Suddenly everyone is talking about funny.

Last night Stephen Colbert took over the Late Show. People have been anticipating and talking about it for nine long, long months. Would he be as funny being Stephen Colbert as he was inhabiting his crazed right-wing persona? People wondered if what we will get on CBS as opposed to the Comedy Channel will be the "real" Colbert.

Illusion and reality. Remember that from your introductory college lit course?

We managed to stay up late enough to see at least a little of the new show and it only served to remind me how much I miss his old one. Not that he wasn't funny. It's just that he wasn't so trenchantly and deliriously funny. But time will tell.

It will help if he'll soon move on from all the self-referential shtick that made up so much of last night's monologue.

One of his guests was Jeb Bush, about the least funny, low energy politicians in America. OK, you got me, there's George Pataki. And Ben Carson. And, to be fair and balanced, Martin O'Malley.

These days you can't run for the presidency without appearing on the equivalent of Laugh In (Richard Nixon) or Arsinio Hall (Bill Clinton in shades playing the sax) or John McCain on Saturday Night Live (of course Sarah Palin too--both as herself and in Tina Fey's realer-than-life incarnation).

When he was running, Barack Obama showed up everywhere, from Jay Leno to doing skits on SNL to boogying with Ellen to trading quips with Letterman and Kimmel.

Wooden candidates from Michael Dukakis to Al Gore, some say, lost the presidency because they lacked a sense of humor. They were missing the "likability" factor.

Speaking of likability, do you recall back in 2008 how when candidate Hillary Clinton was faulted for not being likable, during one of the debates, Obama was asked what he thought about that?

With impeccable timing he said, "She's likable [one beat, two beats] enough." He was roundly criticized for that.

But you know (one beat, two beats) he was right.

She was, and is, not a natural politician and thus comes across as not that likable. Which these days can be a fatal problem.

But that's about to change.

Her campaign over the weekend announced that they're going back to the drawing board and the new Hillary Clinton they promised will be likable.

The scripted, extra-careful, humorless Hillary is about to be funny.

And, risking a gender-bending reaction, it was announced she will be more spontaneous. In the words of her campaign managers, she will speak "from the heart."

What they failed to note is that claiming they can just turn on the funny switch and thereby humanize Hillary is further confirmation that her campaign, and the candidate herself, is an artificial construct.

One minute she's sober and presidential, the next she's hanging out in the back of the press bus knocking down beers and cracking jokes with reporters and getting booked on Ellen and The Tonight Show.

How phony will her new personality seem? I suspect she will come across as pandering and desperate. And it will ironically underscore what many think about her--that she's inauthentic.

Yes, Hillary makes fun of her 'dos ("The hair is real, the color isn't"), which is sort of funny, at least the first time you hear it. But the fact that it is now part of her anti-TRUMP stump speech--he clearly has hair issues--makes it less funny every time it's repeated.

Pretty pathetic.

But, hey, this is 2015! Get with it. It's all about social media and because of social media it's all about being cool and likable. And being likable means you have to be funny.

Even if you aren't.

February 11, 2105--Built On Lies

The problem at NBC is not that Brian Williams is a lier.

He admits now that he sexed up a 2003 report about a foreign-correspondant-trip of his to war-ravaged Iraq--that his helicopter was hit by incoming enemy fire. And there may be evidence that he did a version of the same thing while reporting about Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans (he claimed then that he saw bodies floating by his hotel though there was apparently no significant flooding where his hotel was located); and, who knows, he may have stretched things in a similar self-aggrandizing way during the other assignment that put him on the map, reporting knee-deep in water from South Asia about the tsunami of 2004.

The problem is that the real lie is that he and his anchor colleagues are no longer reporters and that the shows they star in are not about the news. They are exhorbitantly-paid news readers. Reading the script like the actors they are and blow-dried to attract viewers, especially those from coveted demographic groups, all to keep sponsors happy and buying commercials.

All the anchors, with rather thin journalistic backgrounds, but telegenic, Brian Williams, extra-youthful David Muir at ABC, Scott Pelley at CBS, Anderson Cooper at CNN, Megyn Kelly of Fox, and who knows who at MSNBC, all are more in the entertainment business than the news business. Thus their favorite things are to report on events that will garner the highest ratings--natural disasters (hurricanes, blizzards, and tsunamis), terrorist activities (if there is video of beheadings to accompany their reports), and plane crashes. How many hours and days and weeks did CNN devote to the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 307?

Now in paroxysms of schadenfreude, TV colleagues, print journalists, and people calling in to talk shows are asking for William's head. (Not literally of course. But who know.) And as of last night they at least had a taste of blood--NBC suspended him without pay for six months.

Some rue the "fact" that he isn't Tom Brokaw or, even more distressing by comparison, "the most trusted man in America," Walter Cronkite, both of whom presided over TV news when it was still news, not profit centers. Neither Tom nor old Walter, I have been reading in the blogs, ever would have participated in such unprofessional behavior. What is not noted is that Cronkite and Brokaw did not live and work in a world so pervaded by social networks and Internet sites where hyper-scrutiny of anyone famous' missteps go viral and thus magnified beyond proportion.

I cannot claim for certain that Tom and Walter were on the full up-and-up. Can anyone?

When Roone Arledge, who headed ABC's remarkably successful sports operation was asked to also take on responsibility for the network's news division, it was with the assumption that he would turn what had been the Tiffany Network's unprofitable news division into a profit center. He managed to do so by softening up the reporting, getting the hard news out of the way in the first few minutes and then turning to the up-close-and-personal stuff that had been his signature in ABC's Olympics coverage.

The rest is history. Now even NBC's fading Today Show and widely-watched CBS's 60 Minutes make hundreds of millions and are those networks' most profitable shows. And Brian Williams spends more time on the Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live than he does in Syria.

But this TV news environment also contributes to the success of so-called "fake-news," with entertainment and fun unabashedly at the heart of Jon Stewart's Daily Show and the Colbert Report. More young people who even bother to watch TV get their "news" there than on the three networks and cable news outlets. And often that news is real news.

Meanwhile, desperate, isn't it the Today Show that is now raising a puppy on the set?

November 14, 2014--Best of Behind: Now That's Funny

Here is something from just two years ago--November 29, 2012--about the need for humor when things seem bleakest--

When was the last time Barack Obama said anything really funny? Excluding the jokes scripted for him for White House Correspondents' dinners. Like at the one in 2011 when he made fun of Donald Trump's birth certifcate. Funny stuff, but not really that clever much less spontaneous.

I ask because times like these demand that our leaders display a genuine sense of humor. Not just to help us deal with our fears but also to rally the public and make it possible, when struggling with tough issues, to reach consensus and strike deals. It's easier to come to difficult agreements if things are not always portrayed as portentous and grim. Humor has the ability to cut through the dire.

Case in point, the so-called Fiscal Cliff.

It's scary stuff even if you don't feel that it represents the coming of the apocalypse. On January 1st taxes will go up for all, especially for the hard-pressed middle class and working poor; all sorts of social safety net programs will automatically be cut; we may not be able to pay our sovereign debt; our credit rating which is already down a notch will decline further and this will lead to all sorts of nasty international ramifications; and . . .

I take it back--maybe this is the apocalypse. 

If so, then we desperately need to do a little laughing, and not just at the snarky jokes available every night from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but more the self-deprecating kind that is suffused with hard, often unpleasant truth that can best be raised with humor and, as a result, goes down much easier

There is one helpful example out there--Alan Simpson of the Simpson-Bowles Commission. It was created by Barack Obama in 2010 to identify "policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run."

And, amazingly, even as bipartisan as it was (it included the scold Paul Ryan), the commission did come up with a tough series of recommendations that call for real tax increases and heavy-duty cuts in all federal programs, very much including for the Pentagon and Medicare. Ten members, five Democrats and five Republicans voted for it.

But then nothing happened. Facing a tough reelection campaign, Obama thanked them and promptly ignored the commission’s politically unpopular proposals, and the Republican leadership in Congress blanched at the recommended tax increases. So it went nowhere in a hurry.

But now, like Freddy Kruger, it's back because Obama decisively won a second term (he got 53 percent of the popular vote) and all sorts of tax increases and spending cuts will take place automatically at the start of the new year unless Congress and the president work out a comprehensive deal. So Bowles and Simpson have been resurrected and are making the rounds on Capital Hill and on the cable and Sunday talk shows.

Wyoming rancher that he is, the star of the two-man show is former Republican senator Alan Simpson. In addition to being at least as good as Bill Clinton at explaining things, he is also very funny, and this helps him get his difficult messages across; and, if we are lucky, may help save our economic day. He delivers hard truth in humorous, folksy ways and that makes the truth more palatable.

Here are some examples of Simpson unplugged, about the budget as well about other matters--

"If you want to be a purist, go somewhere on a mountaintop and praise the east or something. But if you want to be in politics, learn to compromise. And you learn to compromise on the issue without compromising yourself. Show me a guy who won’t compromise and I’ll show you a guy with rock for brains."

"I watch Republicans. They give each other the saliva test of purity, and then they lose and bitch for four years."

"But the thing that is really impossible to believe is that whatever adjustment we make and whatever has been suggested for the last 10 years in Social Security reform, from top to bottom, none of that affects anybody over 57. Where do I get my mail? From those old cats, 70 and 80 year-olds, who are not affected one whiff. People who live in gated communities and drive their Lexus to Denny's to get the AARP dissent. This is madness."

"Grandchildren now don't write thank you cards for Christmas presents. They are walking on their pants with their caps on backwards, listening to the Enema Man and Snoopy, Snoopy Poop Dog."

Ronald Reagan was funny--just look at videos of him fooling around with his political "enemy," Tip O'Neill as they figured out how to do business together. Then there was patrician Franklin Roosevelt, whose humor helped Americans get through the Depression. And, in spite of how he is portrayed in the current Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln was a great raconteur, which enabled him to get things done with his frequently contentious team of rivals. 

In fact I try not to miss Stephen Colbert; but maybe if our leaders would sit down over a Scotch and while negotiating make each other laugh while poking fun at each other and, more important, themselves, we'd get somewhere.