In yesterday’s New York Times, Stephen Colbert took over Maureen Dowd’s regular opinion column and made a funny case for why he could be the next US president. Read it here. Also listen to his interview last week on NPR’s Fresh Air (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). These appearances all figure into a media blitz designed to boost sales of Colbert’s newly-released book I Am America (And So Can You!), which is already #4 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Not bad.
Vintage Woody Allen (From His Stand Up Days)
I’ve heard this joke many times before on audio, but never seen it on video. Here it goes. The Moose Joke apparently from 1965.
Remembering Lenny Bruce and When Taboo-Breaking Comedy Collided with the Law
Lenny Bruce (born Leonard Alfred Schneider) introduced a strongly satirical, taboo-breaking form of comedy during the 1950s and 1960s, which paved the way for some of America’s great comedians — Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Chris Rock, even John Stewart. And for ushering in this new era of comedy, Bruce paid a heavy personal price. In 1961, San Francisco authorities arrested Bruce on obscenity charges. Then, in 1964, Bruce found himself in the crosshairs of Manhattan’s District Attorney, Frank Horgan. A six month trial followed, which raised important First Amendment issues, and which also brought Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and William Styron to Bruce’s defense. (Dylan would later write a song about the affair.) But, regardless, the trial ended badly for Bruce, and, two years later, the impoverished comedian would die of a heroin overdose.
For Bruce’s legacy, things have gotten a little better. In 2003, Governor George Pataki granted New York’s first posthumous pardon to the satirist, calling it “a declaration of New York’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment.” Meanwhile, legal scholars have written books that paint Bruce and his First Amendment battles in a rather sympathetic light. Below you can find a video clip of Lenny Bruce appearing on the very popular Steve Allen Show. It gives you a pretty good look at the brand of comedy that Bruce presented to the wider nation. (You can access Part II of the video here.) Beyond this, you may also want to check out the actual FBI file that was kept on Bruce. It’s been published thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. And if you’re up for more video footage, here is a clearly deflated Bruce using his trial as fodder for comedy.
Meet Larry David (in Video)
HBO just started airing the sixth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, so it seemed fitting to serve up this lengthy interview with Larry David. The talk is very funny. No shock there. But it also gets into some good substance. How Larry got into comedy; how he struggled during his early standup years and had to scratch together money for a can of Chef Boyardee; how he approaches writing comedy; how he has generated ideas for the most memorable episodes of “Curb” and Seinfeld — it all gets touched on here.
We have included the first part below, plus links to the other seven segments. For more Larry David interviews, check out the 60 Minutes piece on Larry from this past weekend. You can watch it online here.
Stephen Colbert on Books
For a little weekend laugh, here is Stephen Colbert speaking at Book Expo America, pumping his new book, I Am America (And So Can You!), sparring with Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns), trashing Cormac McCarthy, and generally likening books to cigarettes. The clip gets better as it moves along and ends with Colbert hitting his stride.
PS You can also watch Part 2 of the video here.
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John Stewart: When Comedians Start Asking the Tough Questions
When Bill Moyers returned to PBS two weeks ago, his first program took a careful look at how the mainstream media has fallen down on the job when it comes to asking tough questions to politicians. Given this starting point, it seemed logical for Moyers to speak next (iTunes — Feed) with John Stewart, host of The Daily Show. That’s because adversarial journalism is now found more readily on Comedy Central than on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, etc. The interview with Stewart, which is quite substantive and worth a listen, makes reference to John McCain’s recent appearance on The Daily Show and also to Steven Colbert’s famous/infamous roast of President Bush in 2006. You can watch both below.
American television shows have been satirizing politicians for a long time. That’s not new. But what’s new with Stewart is that he’s upending the whole point of television satire. Whether you look at Jay Leno’s tame humor, or the more biting humor of Saturday Night Live, the point of the satire has always been to get a laugh. For Stewart, something else is going on. Watch the McCain interview and you see that the joke is essentially a prop, a convenient means of getting at something much more serious, a way of having a blunt, no nonsense conversation, precisely the kind of conversation that the mainstream media has been largely unwilling, if not downright afraid, to have with our leaders.
Ali G at Harvard; or How Sacha Baron Cohen Got Blessed by America’s Cultural Establishment
Oodles of print have been written about Sacha Baron Cohen’s film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” And there’s perhaps not a great deal more to say about it, other than it’s remarkable how well the film has been received by America’s cultural establishment. Edgy, shock comedy that uses racial and gender stereotypes to subvert racial and gender stereotypes usually doesn’t go down so well with highbrow critics. But, in this case it did. The Washington Post called the film “a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high- and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, … [and] sexism.” (Platonic ideal? Borat?) Of the film, The New York Times said “The brilliance of ‘Borat’ is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.” Then, we heard Terry Gross, of NPR’s Fresh Air, gush over the comic in her amusing interview with Baron Cohen. And lastly, the British comic has been nominated for an Oscar by Hollywood’s film elite.
If any further proof was needed that Baron Cohen has been embraced by the cultural vanguard, then let this video serve as final witness. In 2004, Harvard invited Baron Cohen to speak at “Class Day,” the big traditional event that takes place the day before commencement. And here you get him speaking to students and parents not as Baron Cohen, but as Ali G., all in a light-hearted way. (For more on this visit, see the article in the Harvard Gazette.)
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