Disliked Worlds Collide

Two links have been sitting in a Word document for almost a month, waiting patiently to be turned into a blog posting. Sadly, those two links were forgotten until now, and now they have lost much if not all of their relevance. However, since I’ve been known to post out-dated things, perhaps it is not too late for these links to shine in one of my joyous blog postings. If you read to the end (before and including the update), you might get a relevant and timely surprise!

If this article is not lying, and I don’t believe it is, then The Tonight Show with Jay Leno falsely portrayed the audience response to Sarah Palin when she was a guest on the show. They replaced the audience's silence and sounds of dismay with canned laughter.

It is rather unfortunate that I’m not terribly surprised that Jay Leno and his people would commit such a vile act of falsely representing an audience’s reaction to create the illusion of comedy, love, and admiration in a vacuum of such things to aid a politician. I expect two types of people above most others to be ethical: comedians and scientists. Did you think I was going to say “politicians”? Really? Why would you think such a bizarre thing? I’ve learned not to expect politicians to have ethics or souls; that way, I avoid a lot of disappointment. Anyhoo, Leno’s (or whoever’s decision it was to edit the audience – since Leno’s name is on The Tonight Show, I will hold him responsible) ethical indiscretion is, in my admittedly strange view, on par with those scientists who screwed with the climate change data a few months ago. Scientists and comedians are people we should be able to trust; when either lies, it truly is a sad day.

Fortunately, in a world of lying Lenos, there are also truth-keepers in the form of satirists. Here, Jon Stewart talks about Palin’s Leno appearance, particularly about her crazy claims that Fox News is "fair and balanced."

As if the evil editing to make Sarah Palin appear more loved or less disliked weren’t enough, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno continues to commit evil acts of duplicitous editing today. The "I’m with Coco/Conan O’Brien" Myface (Facebook) fan page posted this article a few days ago, that tells of a brave and heroic Slash wearing an "I’m with Coco" pin that made a forcibly brief appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It’s not surprising at all that Leno and his people cannot handle dissent. Somehow, if something like that were to happen on pretty much any other talk show, the host would go ahead and make jokes about it, because that’s what funny hosts do. Unfortunately, Jay Leno continues to not be the funny talk show host that I know he could be. Of course, the other talk show hosts I allude to would probably not find themselves in such situations, for most if not all of them would not have done what Leno did.

UPDATE April 11, 2010

These disliked worlds collided s’more on SNL; The Tonight Show with Jay Leno will be featured on The Sarah Palin Network.

The Deadly Effects on Humans of Sarah Palin’s Book

While watching this segment from last night’s Daily Show, I realized that the adorable young children to whom John Oliver read excerpts from Sarah Palin’s book (Going Rogue) have clearly been watching David Letterman’s series, “Things More Fun than Reading the Sarah Palin Memoir.”

The children’s examples of things that would be more fun than hearing a reading of Going Rogue closely parallel those of The Late Show with David Letterman. I believe my jocularity regarding the young children’s viewing of The Late Show is obvious. However, the analogous reactions formed by the young children and David Letterman and his writing staff indicates a potentially universal human reaction to Sarah Palin’s memoir – a reaction involving a preference for violent destruction, physical torture, and even suicide over being exposed to the intensely boring torture of Going Rogue.

This clearly elucidates the very obvious fact that Sarah Palin is evil and perhaps even dangerous to all humans, but particularly to young children. Won’t someone please think of the children?! Sarah Palin’s perilous evil is even recognized by the Mayans, who, according to David Letterman, states that their calendar does predict that "the world will end in 2012, but not from floods, earthquakes, or fires,” but rather from the threat of a Sarah Palin presidency.

This brings me to another segment from last night’s Daily Show. Simply put, I agree almost whole-heartedly with Jon Stewart. He presents the belief of the conservative media that we non-conservatives hate Sarah Palin because she is pretty, she hunts, and she’s Alaskan. That is clearly not the case at all. I actually want to like her because she is pretty. I know, that’s wrong, it’s anti-feminist, etc, but it’s just how I feel. Also, she looks a bit like my mother, whom I love like my own mother (probably because she is my own mother), so that’s actually another reason I want to like Sarah Palin. I don’t particularly like her hunting, it seems wrong, especially when she hunts from a helicopter. But I can’t really hate someone who eats what they hunt, for as a non-vegetarian, I’m one step away from doing that as well, though I could never kill anything directly…I mean, except for spiders and some other insects. Regarding her Alaskan origins, I certainly don’t hate her because she lives in Alaska – that’s ridiculous. The only reason I might hate Alaskans is that they elected Sarah Palin governor. Other than that, I don’t have any problem with Alaskans. I mean, it’s not like they’re New Jerseyans. Anyway, I can forgive the Alaskans for electing her since she resigned as their governor so she could write her memoirs.

So, no, I don’t hate her for those superficial reasons as conservative news people from the land of Fox News might like to believe. Rather, I hate her for, as Jon Stewart says, her emptiness, her non-substantiveness, “the nothing…a conservative boiler plate mad-lib…delivered as though it were the hard-earned wisdom of a life well lived…It’s…the boasting about [her] straight-shootin’, when [she’s] not straight shootin’, [she’s] just a talking point machine.”

But I also hate her on those occasions where she does have some degree of substance. I hate her for her overly conservative political beliefs. I have no problem at all with people believing things that differ from what I believe, of course, but I do have a problem with people who feel they should impose those beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, on the rest of the world. That is precisely what Sarah Palin wants to do. Things like forcing her pro-life perspective on women who should have the right to decide what to do with their bodies and abstinence-only sex education – these are some of the reasons I hate Sarah Palin.

Another reason I hate Sarah Palin is discussed in this segment from last night’s Colbert Report. In Going Rogue, Sarah Palin does not take responsibility for anything; she blames others for anything that goes wrong. Additionally, Going Rogue is factually flawed, and she can’t even accept responsibility for that; it’s not her fault, it’s the fault of the fact-checkers who dare to bring her false facts to light.

I hope that reading this blog has been more fun than reading Sarah Palin’s book.

Comedians' Reactions to Letterman Scandal

After October 1, when David Letterman told the story of the alleged attempted extortion involving his affairs with women who worked for him, I wondered how his fellow comedians would react.

This blog from The Huffington Post and this article from the AP tell of what other comedians have been saying about Dave as of the weekend after his confession. It seems most are being easy on him or not talking about it at all. Jay Leno (The Jay Leno Show), Jimmy Fallon (Late Night), Seth Meyers (Saturday Night Live), and Craig Ferguson (The Late Late Show) have made jokes and comments about Dave’s scandal, but none of them were mean about it (towards Dave, that is; some were rightfully mean toward Robert "Joe" Halderman, the alleged blackmailer), which makes me happy.

In the week since Dave’s confession, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert didn’t say a word about Letterman on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, so they're with Conan O’Brien (The Tonight Show) and Jimmy Kimmel (Jimmy Kimmel Live!) in not talking about it, which also makes me happy.

I was very interested to know what Howard Stern thinks about Dave’s scandal.

If you read this article from The Examiner, you would think Howard Stern was hateful, and it almost sounds like Howard was screaming about how horrible Dave is. The article doesn’t misquote Howard, but it takes his statements out of context. If I hadn’t heard Howard myself and if I had only read that article, I would seriously hate Howard, and I’m a fan of Howard.

Since I did hear Howard talking about Dave, I can continue to love Howard (and Dave). As I expected and hoped for from Howard, he was completely honest about his thoughts about the situation. He made it clear that he likes Dave, and credits Letterman for always being supportive of him. He also said that Dave came out with this stuff in a brilliant way, and noted that he's a great communicator. But Howard felt that Dave screwing interns creates a really bad work environment where women feel they have to screw the boss to get ahead and men feel like they can't get ahead because they lack the necessary equipment. He also said if his daughters were taken advantage of as interns like that, he would cut off Dave's winkie. All these things are completely understandable, assuming that his affairs were, in fact with interns (I know Holly Hester came forward as having an affair with Dave while she was an intern), and if other interns and staff members were aware of those affairs at the time, and also assuming that Dave was abusing his position of power in the affairs, which we can't be sure of. I don't feel that Howard was mean-spirited towards Dave at all, as the Examiner article above might imply.

And finally, Dave’s reaction to himself was probably the funniest reaction of all the comedians. On the Monday after the confession, Dave spent almost the whole monologue cracking jokes about himself. He followed this hilarious monologue with another heartfelt statement apologizing to his staff and his wife for hurting them, as well as affirming that he did the right thing in confessing. Of course he ended the string of apologies with another apology to Sarah Palin, because it couldn’t hurt.

Dave has really been handling his scandal well. As both Howard Stern and Steve Martin have said, this scandal really does show us that Dave is human, and as Steve Martin noted, we really weren’t sure of that before.

I think the keep-quiet attitude and the lack of mean-spirited jokes from his fellow comedians show the reigning king of late night the respect that he still deserves, particularly since David Letterman is a victim of a felony.