New York, Thurs 30 Oct 08, 7:30am
You know the end is nigh when the comics come in carrying knives.
The angriest man on US TV isn’t Bill O’Reilly — a blowhard so reliably turned up to 11 on the volume knob that he’s both unwatchable and beyond registering. That is to say, he’s recognisably phoney, and the angst-mongering is all about Bill. The angry man of TV politics right now is Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz) of The Daily Show. Nominally a satirical half hour, the ironies on offer are industrial and the quantities offered suit an American buffet. It is, as many commentators have noted, the place where the real news is reported and the fakes of public life get their comeuppance.
If looks could kill…but jokes do, they really kill you. Stephen Colbert, following up The Daily Show, performs a mirror exposure of Bill O’Reilly — Colbert is a surgeon clown. The incisions leave one rolling around bleeding on the floor. Two million folk watch this pair of political activists every night.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879Above: See Colbert’s extraordinary carve up of George Bush, to his face, at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner.
But more than anything else it is the late evening programs that put the boot in, night after night. If fairies die when a child says she doesn’t believe in them, then politicians start dying when someone laughs at them in the night. Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman et al, and of course David Letterman get some of their best results from knifing the sad sack pollie du jour — and these days that means McCain and Palin. Letterman’s unforgiving rogering of McCain’s dumping of their date surely contributed mightily to the old warrior’s loss of face and credibilty. And finally there is Tina Fey — who became as famous as her Alaskan target. When Tina Fey can get uproarious responses from reciting near verbatim interview answers from her victim, you know the clowns have won.
