In April 2009, while swine flu deaths were still occurring, Jon Stewart managed to find comedy in the possibly impending pandemic. If you host a daily satirical program, it becomes a matter of topicality über alles.
When it was first decided that a fence would be installed to prevent Mexicans from sneaking across the border into the United States, I was performing stand-up and announced that “the government is now hiring illegal immigrants to build a fence that will keep themselves out of this country.” Some months later, in December 2006, the Golden State Fence Company in Southern California agreed to pay nearly $5 million in fines for hiring undocumented workers, and the company’s work actually included constructing part of the fence separating Tijuana, Mexico, from San Diego, California.
That might seem like satirical prophecy, but reality has long been nipping at the heels of satire. In fact, during the past several years, with ever-increasing frequency, reality has been outrunning satire. It wasn’t a comedian who said, “There was a pair of dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.” It was a creationist sincerely trying to reconcile the disconnect between science and religion.
His unintentional joke became an actuality in 2007 at the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, funded for $27 million by evangelical Christians, which presents a Biblical version of history indicating that the universe is not 14 billion years old, but rather that God created Earth in six days 6,000 years ago, and that Cain married his sister in order to populate the planet. One room features two teenagers who were indoctrinated with evolution; the girl is talking to Planned Parenthood; the boy is looking at porn.
A satirist could also have come up with something as absurd as O.J. Simpson’s book and television project, If I Did It, but one person’s sense of humor is another person’s entrepreneurial outlook. That multimedia fantasy was aborted by its own creators—Judith Regan, who came to fame when she handled Howard Stern’s Private Parts, and Fox TV’s Rupert Murdoch, who has struggled so diligently to give insensitivity a bad name—then resurrected by a different publisher in 2007 for the Goldman family as a way of getting some of Simpson’s money awarded to them in the civil suit that found him guilty of a double murder. Simpson is presently in prison for murdering his memorabilia.
And, just as that little two-letter word, “if,” might as well have been omitted from Simpson’s title, John Kerry’s accidental failure to include in a speech another little two-letter word—“us” as in “get us stuck in Iraq”—contributed to his downfall in the presidential campaign. The notion that he meant to insult the troops in Iraq became the party line of cheerleaders for the neocon propaganda team, deliberately misunderstanding what Kerry intended to say until he had to apologize with the same false humility that the lawyer who was shot by Dick Cheney apologized for allowing his face to get in the way of Cheney’s shotgun.
A thirteen-letter wail of, ironically, confidence—“Yeeeaaaggghhh!”—knocked Howard Dean right out of the 2004 presidential race. A six-letter word, “macaca,” not only deleted George Allen’s presidential fantasy, it also enabled the Democrats to win the Senate in the 2006 midterm election with the vote for Allen’s adversary, Jim Webb. There was even hope in Republican circles that Barack Obama’s seven-letter middle name, Hussein, would spoil his chance of being elected president in 2008.
Dennis Miller stooped to making “short jokes” about Dennis Kucinich, who had the fortitude to call for the impeachment of Dick Cheney and George Bush while his colleagues continued to eat grilled chickenshit sandwiches for breakfast over the issue. That’s one thing Nancy Pelosi didn’t take off the table.
During one of the debates among Democratic candidates, the moment that the late Tim Russett said to Kucinich, “This is a serious question,” you knew it wouldn’t be. A different journalist might have asked, “Why do think that Cheney should be impeached before Bush?” But Russert further marginalized Kucinich, ridiculing him in a flying saucer kind of way. Like a trial lawyer who already knows what a defendant’s answer will be, his “serious question” was “Did you see a UFO?”
Kucinich tried to explain that the U in UFO means “unidentified” flying object. He joked, “I’m moving my campaign office to Roswell, New Mexico, and Exeter, New Hampshire.” He pointed out that Jimmy Carter had seen a UFO. Russert interrupted him with a statistic: 14 percent of Americans have seen UFOs. Kucinich asked him to repeat that number, as if to thank him for inadvertently providing him with the UFO-sighters vote. Russert repeated the number, and then, with the smug satisfaction of having generated a guaranteed sound bite, he said, “I want to ask Senator Obama. . . .” Predictably, there was a trickle-down effect. The next day, I was asked if it was true that Kucinich had seen “some Martians.”
Of course, there’s a video of that interstellar encounter inside our secret government’s implied-blackmail lock-box, along with the video of John McCain performing an abortion on Pat Robertson’s mistress, and the video of a threesome—Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein and a billygoat—members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general despite his refusal to say whether he felt waterboarding was torture. McCain passed the buck to the CIA—any torture they approve is good enough for him—despite the fact that he knows from personal experience that victims will tell torturers whatever they want to hear.
Brian Williams, in his capacity as a host of Saturday Night Live, referred to the mainstream media’s assumption that Hillary Clinton would win in the primaries and then in the general election. From the perspective of the networks and cable channels: whoever. Since fundraising seems to be the essence of a political campaign, the candidate with the most money will buy the most TV commercials. And in the process, that old song “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” landed in the Outdated Sayings Graveyard, because there is indeed a business like show business. It’s the news.
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In 1964, Lenny Bruce was found guilty of an “indecent performance” at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. In 2003, New York Governor George Pataki granted Bruce a posthumous pardon—but it was in the context of justifying the invasion of Iraq. “Freedom of speech is one of the great American liberties,” Pataki said, “and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terrorism.” Lenny would’ve felt exploited and bemused.
Earlier that year, when rock-star/activist Bono received an award at the Golden Globes ceremony, he said, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.” The FCC ruled that he had not violated broadcast standards, because his use of the offending word was “unfortunate,” but “isolated and nonsexual.” You see, it was merely an “exclamative” adjective. The FCC did not consider Bono’s utterance to be indecent because, in context, he obviously didn’t use the word “fucking” to “describe sexual or excretory organs or activities.”
But in 2004, during a duet with Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake sang the lyric, “Gonna have you naked by the end of this song,” and in what was defended as “a wardrobe malfunction,” exposed her breast for .562 of a second during the halftime extravaganza at the Super Bowl. I had never seen the media make such a mountain out of an implant.
In 2007, a CBS lawyer argued unsuccessfully that the network should not be fined $550,000 for Jackson’s breast-baring because it was fleeting, isolated and unauthorized. Still, that Nipplegate moment had provided a perfect excuse to crack down on indecency during an election year. So the FCC reversed their own decision, contending that Bono’s utterance of “fucking brilliant” was “indecent and profane” after all. In 2008, an appeals court ruled that the FCC “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in the Jackson case, and observed that the flashing of her breast happened too fast to be considered “so pervasive as to amount to ‘shock treatment’ for the audience.” But then the FCC asked the Supreme Court to appeal that ruling.
At the live Billboard Music Awards show in 2002, Cher responded to her critics, “People have be
en telling me I’m on the way out every year, right? So fuck ’em. I still have a job and they don’t.” Next year on that same awards show, Nicole Richie recounted her Simple Life experience: “Have you ever tried to get cowshit out of a Prada purse? It’s not so fucking simple.” In both instances, the FCC ruled that Fox TV had violated their standards of decency because any use of the word “inherently has a sexual connotation.” Each violation could result in a fine as high as $325,000.
An appeals court reversed the FCC’s reversal in the Bono case, and suddenly he was, once again, not guilty of indecency. But, in April 2009—six days after Fox News anchor Shepard Smith shouted, “We are America! I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps [get information from suspected terrorists]! We do not fucking torture!”—the Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s ruling in the Cher/Richie case, and the reversal of Bono’s reversal was reversed. It was suddenly retroactively unacceptable for him to say, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.” And now, will former Governor Pataki revoke his posthumous pardon of Lenny Bruce?
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Sometimes it feels like I’m making up the news. Reality has become so bizarre that I seem to have lost the ability to tell the difference between truth and fiction. When columnist Rosa Brooks quoted former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton as saying, “I only hope the president has the good sense to bomb Iran before this diplomacy nonsense spreads any further,” I thought he had really said that, but it was a satirical column. Conversely, when I heard that Mitt Romney was asked whether he would invade Iran if elected president, and he replied, “I’d have to ask my lawyers,” I thought that was a made-up joke, but he really said it in earnest.
In December 2008, there was a report traveling around the Internet—with a fake Bloomberg News byline to encourage credibility—that Somali pirates, known for hijacking ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden, were negotiating a purchase of Citigroup. I forwarded it to prolific humorist Andy Borowitz and asked, “Did you write this?” He replied, “No, but it’s funny.” A week later, Borowitz reported that while then-President-elect Obama continued “to assemble his ‘team of rivals’ by filling Cabinet positions with former political opponents, he has drawn the ire of one self-styled rival who feels he has been unfairly overlooked: Rep. Dennis Kucinich. . . . With most of the Cabinet posts having already gone to more prominent rivals such as Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Bill Richardson, Mr. Kucinich’s statements were widely seen as a Hail Mary bid to become Postmaster General.”
A few people I forwarded that to thought it was literally true. One explained, “That was just for a moment. I forgot I was reading Andy Borowitz.” I asked Borowitz if he could recall any other pseudo-journalistic reports he’s posted that have had similar reactions.
“You know,” he replied, “I’ve written so many columns that people have taken to be true, I don’t know where to begin. I recently ended a piece with a bogus ‘quote’ from Doris Kearns Goodwin [author of Team of Rivals] which the Kansas City Star then attributed to her.”
(Goodwin’s quote—“Every time someone says ‘team of rivals,’ I sell another book on Amazon. Team of rivals, team of rivals, team of rivals”—had been preceded by this beginning: “Continuing in his quest to assemble a so-called ‘team of rivals,’ President-elect Barack Obama today announced that he would name Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston to key Cabinet positions. The two actresses, who have been perennial tabloid fodder as a result of their longstanding feud over actor Brad Pitt, were surprise choices for Mr. Obama’s Cabinet, since neither of them has been a government official or even portrayed one in a movie.”)
“But,” Borowitz continued, “this may be my favorite: During the primaries, when Hillary was trying to be all blue collar, she got Annie Oakley on us and claimed that she loved hunting as a little girl. I then wrote a piece about Dick Cheney challenging her to a hunting contest. The Boston Herald actually wrote an entire article about Cheney’s challenge, without bothering to check who the source was.”
Borowitz concluded, “Readers get confused by my articles all the time, but I love it when so-called journalists can’t tell that they’re made up.”
When I was interviewed for a six-part PBS series, Make ’Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America, I mentioned—as an example of a dark reality that could be mistaken for dark humor—a widely criticized Dutch TV program that hoped to draw attention to a shortage of organ donors by having a terminally ill woman choose a contestant to receive one of her kidneys. The next day, the Big Donor Show was revealed as a hoax, with the producers explaining that they were trying to pressure the government into reforming organ donation laws.
At least their motivation had a certain idealism, as opposed to the motivation behind Fox TV’s original intention to promote If I Did It during the November sweeps—a phenomenon comparable to rumspringa, the Amish tradition of “running-around time,” when teenagers and young adult members of the plain-living Christian sect are allowed to act like their debauched non-Amish counterparts. The networks feature the raunchiest, most vulgar, most sensational, most violent, most gory, celebrity-laden programs they can produce, aiming much more than usual for the lowest possible common denominator in order to boost their ratings and charge higher rates for commercials. Potential sponsors buy into it every time, because we viewers are really the product being sold—to them.
Yet false piety continues to thrive. Senator Larry “I’m not gay” Craig—whose opening statement at his August 2007 press conference was “Thank you all very much for coming out today”—rationalized that when he tapped his shoe on the shoe of an undercover cop in the adjoining stall at a public lavatory, it was not a case of “restroom leg syndrome,” but rather his “wide stance,” thereby breaking the feeble-excuse record made by Richard Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, during the Watergate scandal.
She had testified that, while transcribing one of his taped conversations, she answered a phone call, but when reaching for the Stop button on the recorder, she mistakenly hit the “Record” button next to it (unnecessarily), keeping her foot on the pedal, resulting in the infamous 18.5-minute gap. When asked to replicate that position, her extremely awkward posture caused pundits to question the validity of her explanation. She merely wanted to protect Nixon.
And Larry Craig merely wanted to remain a senator so that he could continue perpetuating anti-gay legislation. It all leads back to William Bennett—former education czar, drug czar, morality czar and gambling czar—when he was questioned about Gary Condit, the California congressman who led the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. After Condit admitted that he himself had had an affair with an intern, Chandra Levy (not to mention the allegation that he was behind her disappearance and murder), a reporter asked Bennett whether he thought that Condit was being hypocritical.
“Hypocrisy,” Bennett replied, “is better than having no values at all.”
And hypocrisy is the ultimate target of this book. If I wrote it.
MORT SAHL’S BEST PUNCH LINE
On May 11, 2009, pioneer of political stand-up comedy Mort Sahl turned 82. In the early ’50s, he broke through the tradition of jokes about airplane food, Asian drivers and frigid wives, and instead shared his wit and insights about such subject as militarism, racism and monogamy. I first met Sahl in 1953 when he was a guest speaker in a course I was taking at the New School for Social Research. I was inspired by his satirical approach to serious issues.
“Every word I do is improvised,” he once told me. “I don’t rehearse anything. I start it on stage.”
At the beginning of his career, though, he would write key words on a rolled-up newspaper, which became his trademark prop. In 1960 he wrote jokes for presidential candidate John Kennedy, and Sahl’s face, surrounded by balloons, was on the cover of Time magazine during the conventions in August. When Kennedy was killed in 1963, Sahl endangered his career and was blacklisted as a result of becoming an associate of New Orleans
District Attorney Jim Garrison in his investigation of the JFK assassination.
In 1967 I was a guest on Sahl’s TV show, which had been dealing outspokenly with contemporary controversies, so when his option wasn’t renewed, ostensibly because of low ratings, there was much suspicion. But Sahl also had a nightly radio show and asked his listeners to write in to KTTV. By the time 31,000 letters arrived, the channel’s executives had conveniently discovered another rating service and the option was renewed.
On the program, Sahl had a blackboard on which he wrote things in chalk like “We Demand Faith in the Future,” and the audience applauded faithfully. He wanted to have a mock trial on the show as a preview of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, and he asked me to return and act as defense attorney. He wanted me to defend war criminals such as Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. I agreed to do it. My plan was to plead insanity.
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On June 28, 2007, the Heartland Comedy Foundation, which sponsors fundraisers and assists comedians, honored Mort Sahl at the Wadsworth Theater in Brentwood. When my wife Nancy was 16, she listened over and over to his first album until she memorized it, just as she had done with the score of My Fair Lady. Now we were sitting two rows behind Sahl, watching him enjoy and appreciate one tribute after another by a gaggle of comedians.
There were the original gang members: Jonathan Winters (in character as an aging baseball star), Norm Crosby (master of malapropism) and Shelley Berman (doing his classic rotary-phone call, still dialing a number rather than pressing buttons).
And there was the newer breed: a surprise appearance by George Carlin (his set piece on contemporary schizophrenic man, followed by a film clip of his 1962 impression of Sahl), Jay Leno (charming, even with fat-joke material), Richard Lewis (skillfully balancing along the tightrope between dick comedy and Dick Cheney), Drew Carey (referring to the bus driver who told Rosa Parks to move to the back of the bus as “the father of the civil rights movement”), Harry Shearer introducing Kevin Nealon, and Bill Maher courting political incorrectness.
Who's to Say What's Obscene? Page 2
