In case you haven't seen it: The Washington Correspondents Dinner is always about backslapping and mutual asslicking -- everyone's done a hell of a job this year, every year -- served with a chaser of intentionally "inappropriate" "humor." While not nearly as hilariously appalling as Laura Bush's comments last year about her husband's virility and his penchant for jerking off horses or her husband's charming slideshow of his search for those pesky missing WMDs in his office the Dinner the year before [the good old days when only about 500 Americans and a few thousands Iraqis had been killed], Steven Colbert's speech at this year's Dinner yesterday crossed the line and the few miles between ultimately-reassuring ribbing and speaking truth to power.
It's fairly astounding how memorable and cleanly written each of his jokes are -- the long periods of audience silence makes Colbert's performance all the more heroic -- and he did this at the end of a working week at THE COLBERT REPORT. I remember Jon Stewart had to take a week off from THE DAILY SHOW to just host SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, and that show sucked. Speaking of SNL and its suck, I could have lived without Colbert's overlong press-secretary-audition film at the end of his spot, as much as I love Helen Thomas.
Unsurprising for a few reasons -- in a nutshell, audiences prefer shiney objects to challenging ideas, which is also far easier for a producer to package -- Colbert's half-hour asskicking of the Powers That Be and their mainstream media has been all but shoved down the Memory Hole in favor of a short skit where Bush and a Bush imitator gave twin speeches being presented as the highlight of the night.
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While I'm posting YouTube links, here are my other favorites of late:
The program cuts him off in mid-sentence, but this three-part TV interview with Aldous Huxley is pretty great. It's reassuring that people retain and share things like this.
IT'S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME! Videos of people playing with their cats really are much more intimate than amateur videos of people fucking.
I almost forgot to include this lovely "shoot" interview with the guy to playing '80s pro-wrestler The Iron Sheik ranting about his method for imparting humility: Suplex him, put him in a Camel Clutch, break his back and then fuck his ass.
Rose recently blew some of my mind with this music video for Daler Mehndi's "Tunak Tunak Tun." Which reminds me: I found that the "Piyu Bole" segment of PARINEETA has made its way onto the site. Sigh.
And no tour of YT is complete without a link to something on the edge of Not-Work Safe; behold, The Oozinator! Clearly, Hasbro has more than a few bukkake enthusiasts.
1 comment:
I remember when Imus spoke during Clinton's term and raised a similar stink. Of course that got more prominent media play. Just yesterday, the spin was that GW was a good sport (of course the unfunny impersonator was spotlighted).
The skeptic in me, however, says that the only reason Colbert's routine got approved was because Bush can pretty much do whatever he wants anyway even at .5% approval.
Still, he looked pretty irked.
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