The Gingrich Who Stole Race

I'm done, I'm through, I've had it. Really, I give up. You know that really cute saying by Tom Lehrer about how awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger made satire obsolete? At a certain point, you just reach the end of your rope and you say, it's over. Lehrer continued to write satire, he continued to work in parody, he refused to give up; I, on the other hand, think there is no more point having any sort of conversation about comedy.

Newt Gingrich, a man sculpted by God from leftovers from Rush Limbaugh's right buttock, has demanded apologies for a joke Robert De Niro made at a fundraiser. Gingrich called the joke inexcusable; he wants President Obama to apologise. And you know what? Because the fundraiser was attended by Michelle Obama, and because the joke involved her, Michelle Obama's people . . . agreed, and called the joke 'inappropriate.' They caved in, they agreed with Gingrich, and they threw De Niro out of the back of a bus, so to speak.

That's the country, and that's this presidency, in a squirrel-gnawed nutshell.

The Yankee Fan with the Golden Gun

@stevenpoole asked a really good question:

What exactly is the "news value" of a picture of a dead body that is not already contained in the information that said person is dead?

Do such images add "news value" to descriptions like:

In a cellphone video that went viral on the Internet, the deposed Libyan leader is seen splayed on the hood of a truck and then stumbling amid a frenzied crowd, seemingly begging for mercy. He is next seen on the ground, with fighters grabbing his hair. Blood pours down his head, drenching his golden brown khakis, as the crowd shouts, “God is great!”

When the news first came out about Gaddafi's execution, the photographs and video images did - not despite, but as evidence for, the analyses of Barthes and Sontag - provide a sense of confirmation, but this sense of confirmation may be adding something other than what I would understand by "news value"; its value lies elsewhere.

Performance

You might have seen Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers headlining the annual journalist-politician-celebrity centipede that goes by the name The White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. You can find the video here. The only reason to watch the video of Meyers' performance, or at least the first few minutes, is because right after his April 30th bin Laden joke, you get to see a real performance: Obama's. Watch it up to about 2.21. Watch Obama. Is there the slightest hint, the slightest tell, the slightest indication? No. Nothing. It's impressive.

The following day, Donald Trump gave his typical ruffled, jowly, insistently vulgar performance, complaining about Meyers and how he botched several lines, but Trump was no doubt still sore from the sharply-pointed, but hardly surprising, jabs clobbering him about his silky mane. Trying to create a ruckus and not yet aware that his presidential campaign circus was going to be interrupted by something a little bit more newsworthy, Trump critiqued Meyers as follows:

“I thought Seth Meyers, frankly, his delivery was not good. He’s a stutterer and he really was having a hard time.”

Naturally, CNN found the Stuttering Foundation's president for a comment:

“Shame on you, Mr. Trump,” said the foundation's president, Jane Fraser. “We at the Stuttering Foundation find it discouraging that in 2011, Donald Trump has chosen to use the word 'stutterer' in a derogatory fashion, something to be made fun of, to describe Seth Meyers' speech at the annual White House Correspondents' dinner.”

I have an ethical question for any journalists out there. If the president of the Stuttering Foundation stutters when she's giving a statement, do you transcribe the stutter?

I've been thinking about journalistic ethics over the past few days. The one thing that has made me really livid - other than losing two, yes two, memory sticks, with decades worth of work on them including my most recent stuff (yes, I can hear you sighing with relief) - the one thing that made me more livid than losing my two memory sticks with my magnum opus - no, there's more than one magnum opus, there's many, I should probably say my opus dei (you're sighing with relief again) - has been the "journalism" about the role of torture in what I have been calling the very brief capture of Osama bin Laden. This "journalism" is epitomised by CNN's "Senior Political Analyst", Gloria Borger: equivocal, frustrated with the facts, but most of all fair and balanced in that it is equally insipid and insidious. There have been some weak rebuttals to this resurgence of weak-kneed, wobbly-souled journalism, which occupies a sort of banal suburb of thought where evil outcasts can live in peace, and at least one stronger one, though even it is somewhat tainted.

It would be interesting to compare the phony equipoise of Borger's brand of journalism, which is a performance in and of itself, an enactment of a crass, even trivial, interpretation of the role of objectivity, with a much denser, but also lighter-spirited, sense of unease that is performative as a process - see, for example, Jon Stewart's ten minutes on the very brief capture of Osama bin Laden from May 2nd or, by way of unspeak.net, this by Adam Kotsko.

Wham Bam

The list of things that aren't quite as good as they should be is soul-numbingly long. Glee would be near the top of the list right now, but as the anti-Glee bandwagon is getting more crowded than the Glee bandwagon, I can't really find anywhere to jump, so I've skulked away to pretend it doesn't exist. Community deserves a spot on the list, despite also being better than it could have been, and The [US] Office has long tarried there. The novels of Louis de Bernières, recent Scorsese films, Lou Reed's hairstyles, New York pizza, any father who isn't a 'tit singer' ... the list of disappointing things is a very long one, and it extends quickly towards the horizon when you start to add things that were once amazing but now, in retrospect, aren't quite as good as we once thought (Seth Rogan, 1980s sitcoms, Lou Reed's hairstyles)

Of course, what is really prominently positioned at the very pinnacle of the list, standing a lanky, greying head and shoulder above the disappointing throng, is the presidency of Barack Obama. I know, I know. But it's true. One of Jay Leno's writers stated the painfully obvious through the ham-jawed, stage-pacing ventriloquist's dummy: "President Obama said he plans on running for reelection against the Republicans. After the tax-cuts for the rich, the bailouts for Wall Street, and the bombing in Libya, I already thought he was the Republican candidate." Glenn Greenwald over at salon.com (which is my main competition for readers, though I think I've siphoned off about 45% of their traffic) is charting a much more painstakingly detailed course through the oil-polluted waters lapping across the deck of Obama's sinking presidency.

I was curious to find out what sort of jokes are being told about Obama, outside of the slightly-scared laughter emanating from The Daily Show audience, who can see the wounded disenchantment in Jon Stewart's eyes. So, I typed in a search-term of some sort and found a bunch of sites, which I perused. It's always strange to seek out comedy and jokes where even from the (presumed) privacy of your home you don't expect to be part of the audience; it's strange to be alone and to know there are kindred souls out there chuckling at the same time, but not as strange as the weird solitude of listening in on a conversation other people are enjoying from the silence of one's own room and finding in that conversation nothing to share.

This list of jokes is strikingly barren. I cannot say that I even forced the corners of my mouth into a formal smile of recognition, although I accepted that a number of the jokes had various features that would place them in the category of comedy. The comments, despite one lonely plea in the middle to steer clear of racist material, hone in on racist jokes, the hallmark of which is that they say nothing about Obama except by way of how they are racially designating him and then slurring those who share the racial designation. And I would be ashamed to have come up with the poor quality jokes the editors of another, purportedly comprehensive, list include, and this is coming from somebody whose blog is full of such poor quality jokes, his readers don't even notice them. (Hey, what's Sarah's only qualification for running against Barack? She's Palin comparison. What's the difference between Obama and Osama? Osama has plundered plutocrats' wealth to fund his wars.)

One of the most peculiar things about comedy is that an act of comedy - a joke, a pun, an impersonation - may have all the necessary formal qualities but there can be absolute disagreement about its essence, its effect, its core aesthetic virtue: whether or not it is funny. Of course, out on the edges of any aesthetic movement, one may be compelled to ask "Is it art?" but, crucially, that question can be answered, and, even more crucially, the question may even be a productive, instructive way to begin a conversation. "Is it funny?" is far less likely to lead to a conversation about a comic act that renders it funny, and it is possible to ask the question with deadly earnestness as myriad people around you are busting their guts.

One reason for this potent divide is that an entire Weltanschauung can be packaged into a joke of only a few words: the tiny fragments of scaffolding that make up a joke -- a few pieces of rusted pole and an odd-looking twisty device that holds sections of pole together -- can also house nearly endless boxes of information, whole libraries of sentimental and political-philosophical books, lengthy corridors lined with portraits, picture galleries and treasuries of old videos and film clips, and Grandma in her rocking chair by a roaring fire. If you approach a joke without similar furnishings and gimcracks, you're left with a useless, empty, and terribly small frame.

Another reason is a less positivist version of the first (or really, more positivist, because it relies not on Danielewskian architecture, but on visible or reproducible or nameable ploys to evoke the negative): the joke expands into commentary and comedy not just out of what we have but what we pretend or think we don't have. The defensive functions, for example, of denial, so usefully employed by so many of the birthers who insist, sincerely, that they are not racists; their sincerity is not a function of integrity but a product of total submission to denial, and so their jokes are ones they can share with their (imaginary, or otherwise depressed and frustrated) "black friends". If the psychology of defensive functions, of denial and reaction formation and repression, of compromise and displacement. which can construct out of a few snippets of words a system of the world and an appreciation of that world by infiltrating the spaces between the words and in the words with the materials of the unconscious without even necessarily being aware that you are doing this, are not your cups of tea, then the joke still hinges at the unspoken and the unspeakable, the actively-forgotten; and if this isn't your cup of tea either, then take your thirst somewhere else.

I know you're asking: how is any of this different from the response to any art or any "text"? I really wish you wouldn't ask that, you bastards. To come up with an answer would be to come up with a final definition of comedy. I can offer two (non)answers. The first is that there is no quantitative difference, just a qualitative one, to which you are guided by the structure and the paradigms (or, really, the repertoire of paradigms) in comedy: surprise, reference and quotation, incongruity, etc., which designate the aesthetic experience a comedic one. The second is that comedy, unlike other forms, sustains an ambiguity within the resolution, where the dynamics of the ambiguities are not fully explained by the end result and yet remain decisive, whereas with other arts or other "texts" there is a completion which is suspended where the joke is decisive, and finalised where the joke presents only a blank stare.

Which is the same type of stare you're giving the screen right now, right?