Category: Funny Stuff
Bawling Boehner could learn from the Boss
The new Speaker of the House has an image problem. After weeping in an election night victory speech and again in a 60 Minutes interview, John Boehner again shed tears when taking the gavel from Nancy Pelosi. Now an established pattern, Boehner’s tears have David Letterman wondering if he’s on drugs. Others simply wonder if this is the new status quo of American politics. Either way, being “the guy who cries a lot” is a pretty open invitation to the brand of ridicule that would diminish a message.
Boehner might find some inspiration from a fellow Ohioan, the late George Steinbrenner.
In 1990, Steinbrenner appeared on Saturday Night Live during his commissioner-ordered sabbatical from baseball. In one memorable sketch, The Boss played a convenience store owner who refused to fire employees, no matter how much they underperformed:
Where is it written if you don’t get results right away, you fire people?… How would you like it everytime something went wrong, I just blamed you, the supervisor, huh? Let’s just fire the supervisor! Then I’ll hire some other guy, and something would go wrong and I’d fire him, and I’d probably rehire you!Then fire you again, bring in someone else, then fire him and rehire you again! Then fire and hire, back and forth until the whole thing’s just a big joke! Is that the kind of owner you want? Some yammering nincompoop in a fancy suit? No way you take that road, ’cause before you know it, you’ll probably be banned from running the entire company!
Three years later, Steinbrenner was back in baseball, but his self-deprecating sense of humor remained sharp. He played himself in the 1994 movie The Scout, and filmed an unaired cameo for Seinfeld. His public criticism of Billy Martin and Derek Jeter both became tongue-in-cheek commercials, nearly three decades apart. The results of this were last year’s kind eulogies, which forgave many of his faults.
So what does that mean for the Weeper of the House? Boehner would be wise to aggressively embrace self-deprecating right away – diminishing both his tendency to cry and his critics’ tendency to make a big deal of it.
And now, the real news about the fake news
The Onion debuts two cable television programs this month. The fake newspaper turned fake internet news site presents a unique and specific genre of comedy – the obviously false presented as seriously real. It’s similar but a bit different from slapstick comedies like Airplane! or Spaceballs. It’s closer to Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update as delivered by the more deadpan performers, like Kevin Nealon in the early 1990s. The 1970s spoof talk show Fernwood 2 Night and the long-forgotten short-lived Nick at Night television review series On the Television may be the best examples, even if short-lived. Because the audience is in on the joke but the performers are apparently not, it depends as much on performance as it does on clever writing.
Since this type of humor is so specific, it’s unsurprising that the Onion’s television ancestors met with limited success. What has given the Onion its staying power?
The Onion – which started as a small, regionally distributed newspaper in 1988 – became an early example of the internet’s power of viral distribution. It may be difficult for a network television show to find the audience it needs to build a niche following; the Onion’s following grew over time as its stories were forwarded by email. When the Onion’s television shows air this month, they will have already recruited their niche audience online over approximately 15 years.
There’s one final layer to peel back, and that’s the Onion’s business model based on generating large amounts of free, high quality content. The term “viral growth” is overused, but is applicable to the Onion’s rise through virtual word-of-mouth. The content brought traffic, and the traffic brought money – both in terms of advertising, book deals, and now television shows. None of it would have worked without something that was worth sending in an email to a friend. Funny always came first – and the money followed. Other small, regionally distributed newspapers who are struggling may want to take note.
The era of the Citizen-[INSERT PROFESSION HERE]
First, came the citizen-journalists – the bloggers in their pajamas whose reporting overturned Walter Cronkite’s old chair and dumped out Dan Rather.
Then came the citizen-politicos – the self-organizing crusaders who organized largely online but made a difference in the real world, giving alternating advantages to the left in 2006 and 2008 and the right in 2010.
And now come… the citizen scientists. An English gas worker has discovered four new planets by analyzing public data at his home computer. No telescope, no university observatory, no office – just a proficiency for math and the love of the game. It’s legit, too, as the University of California has given the discovery a seal of approval.
This may explain why people have been slow to support environmental regulations with drastic economic impacts. The previous argument – “Trust us! We’re SCIENTISTS!” – can’t carry weight.
Sunday Funnies: 2010 in review
$#!% Ed Rendell says
Outgoing Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell was displeased by the cancellation of the Sunday night Eagles-Vikings game:
“My biggest beef is that this is part of what’s happened in this country,” Rendell said.
“We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything,” he added. “If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”
Because, as we all know, Asians are good at math, right? While the Governor talks off the cuff somewhat frequently – especially now that he probably isn’t facing re-election, it’s somewhat incredulous that no one is complaining about that calculus remark, isn’t it? It’s a good thing he didn’t go with any of these rejected lines:
- “If this was in Ireland, people would have been stumbling down to the stadium, taking occasional breaks to urinate in the snow, and singing ‘Fields of Athenry’ the whole way down.”
- “If this was in Germany, people would be goose-stepping down to the stadium, taking over the Polish section of Philadelphia on the way down.”
- “If this was in China, people would have been marching down to the stadium, doing calculus, because the murderous Communist regime would beat them to death if they didn’t.”
Still, the Chinese stereotyping wasn’t the dumbest thing about Rendell said. For that, you have to consider that, in the Governor’s mind, cancelling a football game symbolizes a nation lacking in backbone.
See, if I were looking for an example of a lack of discipline, I might pick having a state government that’s $8.4 billion in debt, or a state debt tally that grew 39% during its current governor’s eight-year term. In fairness, the governor that approved all that spending isn’t necessarily a wus; maybe he’s just bad at math.
Too bad he isn’t Chinese.
Merry Christmas!
Gentlemen, let’s close up for Christmas!
Sunday Funnies: The misogynistic internet of yesteryear
Behold – the world of tomorrow:
Conan’s set as a TV strategy
Conan O’Brien’s TBS premiere last night is sitting on my DVR and waiting for a more formal viewing. But from the clips I caught this morning, one thing is both apparent and unsurprising: O’Brien knows that he has a pale and ruddy complexion. (I feel his pain.) Check out this picture swiped from an AP story:
Note all the blue in his new set – a similar color scheme to his short-lived Tonight Show set. This wasn’t just to save money – it’s an old trick for anyone who is going on TV. Television lights are harsh, and tend to reflect badly off of white shirts, so many talking heads will make sure they have a blue shirt at the ready if called to do an on-camera interview. This is even more true for people with pale skin like O’Brien (who frequently pokes fun at himself over his ultra-Irish tone). Even something as seemingly minor as a blue shirt can have a dramatic impact on how an audience sees an on-air personality, and these visual cues are surprisingly important to the perception of the show’s content.
When O’Brien took over the Tonight Show – thus thrusting him in front of a new audience – the show’s producers likely recognized that they needed to do what they could to make the image that got beamed into the nation’s living rooms and bedrooms as visually appealing as possible. Rather than settling for a blue wardrobe, they went for an entire set. With the stakes arguably even higher for his new endeavor, the blue set came with O’Brien to TBS.
Jim Eltringham 