Hitchens zings Franken, Stewart, and Colbert

Al Franken, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart have egos the size of a planet, but Hitchens' review of their books hopefully hurt a little.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/satire

[Their material] certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke.

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Stewart, too, has something of a fat-target problem, and seems partly unaware of this problem’s source in his own need to please an audience that has a limited range of reference. In Naked Pictures of Famous People, when he decides to lampoon Larry King—who in any context is a barn-door-size target—he still manages to make the attack too broad. There’s no slight nudge, but a huge dig in the ribs. It needs to be “Adolf Hitler: The Larry King Interview.” And Hitler has to be a guest who has been helped by therapy to become more of a people person. Here’s his opening reply to King’s welcome to the show.

HITLER: (biting into a bagel) First of all, Larry, I don’t know what I was so afraid of. These are delicious!!!

At whose expense, I wonder, are those three (count them!) exclamation marks? Who is afraid that who will miss what point?

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But [Franken who has a powerful wit] is barely even funny when funny is all he is trying to be. See if the following causes you to smile. It’s taken from his inaugural address, on page 223 of Why Not Me?

As the Mandingo buck, Mede, says in the movie after he has been brought to James Mason’s plantation to be used as breeding stock, “Massa, it beez wrong to sell a nigger like a plow horse.” He’s right. It does beez wrong. It beez very wrong. These words are as true today as when Ken Norton said them twenty-six short years ago. And I am here today to say that it was wrong to hunt escaped slaves down on horseback; it was wrong to boil slaves alive; and it was wrong to sell a black woman merely because her breasts had grown too droopy.

Jeepers. Of course the “irony” is that the passage is supposed to make you cringe a bit, but this crucially lowered and degraded definition of what is ironic is accidentally confessed a touch later on in the same book, when Franken is writing in his own voice:

“Ironic distance” is not [Al] Gore’s problem. Not that he doesn’t have a well-developed sense of irony. He actually has a terrific sense of humor.

See, there’s your problem. A sense of irony is to be carefully, indeed strictly, distinguished from the possession of a funny bone. Irony is not air-quote finger-marks, as if to say “Just kidding” when in fact one is not quite kidding. (Does anyone ever say “Just kidding” when in fact only kidding?) Bathos is not irony, though Franken and Stewart and Colbert seem unaware of this. Irony usually partakes of some element of the unintended consequence.

Franken's comments about slavery are funny because a presidential candidate who made insensitive comments about race would destroy his career. The humor lies in the discrepancy between how you expect a pol to talk about race and how Franken's send-up of a pol talks about race. This discrepancy is not irony; it is absurd humor. But Franken reveals that he thinks absurd humor and irony are the same thing when he says that Al Gore's sense of ironic distance is proven by his terrific sense of humor.