Ramble On: Comic Sans Comedy

Morning thoughts on Colbert, "South Park," "Idiocracy," Werner Fink, and the power of satire as a weapon against fascism.

Good morning! Here is today’s Friday ramble:

And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. As you’re watching this, is Friday morning, August 1st. As I’m recording it, it is still July—July 31st. It’s five o’clock p.m. or thereabouts.

As you can see, I am back in my office, which means also that I am back from Spain—unfortunately. We had a great time. Barcelona is fantastic. Catalonia is fantastic. Montserrat took my breath away. I’ll be writing about that in the days to come, I’m sure.

While I was gone, it seemed like there wasn’t that much breaking news that I missed. Obviously, the Epstein story continues apace. Great! Every time Trump opens his mouth, he says something stupider and stupider and it’s getting harder to deny the fact that he was pretty good friends with this horrible sex trafficker. And now it looks like he’s contemplating pardoning the arguably even worse sex trafficker in exchange for, I guess, her lying and basically declaring his innocence—which no one will believe.

I’d like to think that if he does that, even MAGA will be like, “Wait, what? You did what? For why?” But, you know, I’ve been wrong about Trump before. He endures and endures and endures, against all logic. But I guess logic doesn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t know what does. Emotions, I suppose. Laziness, inertia, whatever word you want to use.

Anyway, I want to talk about comedy, because the two stories that broke while I was away involve comedy. First, we have Stephen Colbert, who I’ve been a huge fan of for years and years, getting canceled by CBS—CBS bending the knee to Trump and sacrificing Colbert on the altar to the Great Orange God. Or so it seems. That’s the optics of it. I question the wisdom of canceling a guy and then saying he can go right ahead and continue to do his show until May. I think Colbert now has nothing left to lose, and he’s going to really sharpen the knives (metaphorically speaking) and really come hard after all of the targets—whether it’s CBS or Paramount or that new weirdly named company, and certainly Trump himself.

So that’s one of the stories.

The other story was, South Park came back on for Season 80 Million, and they did an episode really going after Donald Trump (finally). Where Trump is basically kind of like Kim Jong Un was in the movie, the “America, fuck yeah!” movie—Team America: World Police, that whole thing. Satan is there again in bed with him, which they did with Saddam Hussein. And it was a big deal because they did this special and they’re just basically making fun of how small and insignificant Donald’s penis is.

So that’s what’s happening.

And the thing that—it doesn’t bother me, it’s just something I want to note—is the lack of cleverness, of wit. The whole thing is basically, you know, it’s skewering Trump in a way that will hurt him, which I approve of, obviously. But it’s kind of doing what Trump does.

I’m working on a project now, a piece I’m in the process of writing, where I’ve had to go back and listen to, or read the transcripts of, interviews that Trump gave when he was on The Howard Stern Show back in the 90s. I’ve never liked The Howard Stern Show. I grew up in New Jersey. He was always on the radio. Some of my friends liked him. I always felt that Stern taught one of my friends, in particular, who never really understood how to relate with women properly and appropriately, the wrong lessons. I felt like Howard was a bad influence. Not to sound like a prudish schoolmarm, but just the sort of demeaning way that Stern talked about women all the time. At least that’s that was my perception when I was in high school. So the fact that I was more mature in high school—and it’s not even like I was the most mature person, because I wasn’t—than Stern and his guests back then is saying something.

Obviously Howard Stern is a really good interviewer when he wants to be and has more than made up for his past sins, in my estimation. And he’s been pretty virulently anti-Trump for a while now, which is great. But those old interviews are just Howard egging Donald on, talking about sex in kind of an eighth-grade-boy way that’s gross and disrespectful and also just not funny. It’s just like, “Hey, how much can we get away with, how can we push you to say this thing? Like, how far will you go to say stuff?” And I guess that’s what gave him ratings at the time. And so he encouraged that behavior.

The point is that, as comedy, there wasn’t much there. I get that they’re having fun and they’re rollicking and they’re not maybe totally serious—although I think Trump probably was. Trump at that point was his mid-50s and he’s, you know, talking like he’s in seventh or eighth grade in a locker room about fictitious girls that he never even hooked up with. That’s what it sounds like to me, especially now going back and listening again.

And I feel like the South Park stuff has some of that same element. Again, I’m happy that they did it, wonderful, but as a writer and as somebody who does comic things sometimes (or attempts to), I find the low level of content just sort of disappointing. I guess I was disappointed that they couldn’t be more clever simultaneously.

Like, it’s not funny, right? The episode isn’t funny. We laugh because we want Trump to be hurt by it. We’re doing the same thing—or South Park is doing the same thing—that Trump does, essentially. Just being really, really nasty. It’s nasty. Trump always uses the word nasty. The South Park thing was nasty. They were nasty to Trump in a way that the word for once would apply to—although I don’t think Donald’s used the word nasty here because the South Park guys are not women and he only uses nasty when he’s talking about women because he’s a disgusting, patriarchal, sexist pig.

The content there, I don’t know, it’s like they’re lowering down into his level to hit at him. And that’s necessary and I applaud them for doing it. I just wish they had done it sooner, and I wish they had done it longer—throughout the last nine years.

Let’s go back to Colbert for a second. Because I’m talking through this to figure out why I feel weird about this. Back in 2006, Stephen Colbert was the host of The Colbert Report—or maybe he wasn’t even, I think he was on the Report by then, but he might still have been on The Daily Show as the correspondent.

If you’re not familiar with that show, he played a character: a rightwing, Fox News-style kind of guy, also named Stephen Colbert. And the amazing thing about The Colbert Report is he never broke character, ever. It was astonishing to watch. He was always in this character and it was very funny. And it was a really good way to skewer the Bush people during the Bush administration—Cheney and all these guys.

Sometimes people thought he really was a rightwing commentator and a rightwing comic. Whoever was in charge of this White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006 clearly thought that, mistakenly, and invited Colbert to do the comedy thing that they do. All the press people are gathered in a room. Colbert is at a podium, and George W. Bush and Laura Bush are just right next to him, basically. They’re like six feet away from him.

And he goes into this comedy routine. And it’s funny. It’s like legit funny, and he just really nailed Bush. Who’s a—whatever you say about him, Bush is an amiable person, I think; meaning, he likes to joke around and stuff like that. And he just sat there stone-faced the whole time. Although it was funny. I mean it was legit funny. And the people in the audience, the journalists, were kind of afraid to laugh. These were jokes that demanded laughter—I was laughing at in my room, me and my wife, just laughing, because it’s so funny—but nobody there was laughing, which was weird. And Bush certainly wasn’t laughing.

And I remember thinking, “My God, they’re gonna kill him. They’re gonna kill Colbert. Something’s gonna happen to him right now.” I was actually afraid for his life a little bit. Obviously nothing happened like that. He went on with the routine—it’s like an 11-minute comic monologue. And it was brilliant, and it was funny—legitimately funny and clever, but it also did what it needed to do, which was, it hammered at Bush.

Not only that, but it took enormous physical courage to do it, because he’s there in the same room, six feet away from the guy, which is—you know, a lot of us, myself included, would not have been able to go through with that. I don’t think I would have been able to do it. I think a lot of people wouldn’t. I don’t think Jon Stewart would have been able to do it at that moment in time, to name but one person. I think a lot of people wouldn’t have been able to go through with it in the way that Colbert did.

To me, that was an example of real courage in the face of evil. Not that Bush is the same level of evil as Trump, because he’s not even close, but he was a pretty bad guy. Colbert was doing the truth-to-power thing, and it was really powerful. It was powerful. And funny—legit funny.

So when you compare the South Park episode to that—South Park can also be very funny. And then it often devolves into this…the same kind of neighborhood of Howard Stern talking to Donald in 1998, that level of humor. And that’s where I kind of tune out, and I don’t like it. It just goes in weird directions and it ruins it for me. That’s my own personal opinion, right? But I feel like these South Park guys making this episode—which is more mean than funny—right after signing a one-point-five billion dollar contract with the people they are going to go skewer…did that really take a lot of courage?

I mean, I don’t know. Maybe it did. I’m glad they did it, but they could have been doing more up until this point. And I know they hit Trump a little bit before, but you know, this has been an all-hands-on-deck situation for a while now.

I’m reading a book now that my friend gave me called Defying Hitler (which is a terrible title) written by a guy named Sebastian Haffner (which is not his real name; it’s his pen name.) It’s a memoir that he wrote in 1938. He was born in 1907 in Berlin, and he’s Prussian. His father was a member of the administration of the government. Not the Nazi government, the government earlier on. And he, Sebastian Haffner, was not a Nazi. He was basically the equivalent of what we are now. And the book—which, again, is written in 1938, which is before the war even started, a year before the war even started—is about the coming to power of Hitler. The chronology of it, the zeitgeist in Germany, in Berlin. And he weaves in his own experiences and his own moments and kind of reports on what’s happening.

On the topic of comedy, I wanted to read this passage from the book, because Haffner talks about this. He has a thing happen to him. It’s March 31st, 1933, and the Nazis, they’re now in power. Hitler is early on in power, and they’re really starting to clamp down on the Jews. Haffner’s not Jewish, but he’s very, very opposed—to his credit, morally, passionately opposed to what Hitler is doing in discriminating against Jewish people all over Germany. One day everything’s fine, and then the next day it’s not, and it’s confusing. The book is a good read to understand how this happened and how it confused people even at the time.

In the morning, he goes to the law library; he’s a lawyer. And he’s in the law library doing his job, and they come in, the Nazis do—and this hasn’t happened yet before to him in the law library—to make sure that all the Jews in the library leave. It’s March 31st, 1933, so it’s pretty early on. And they come over to him and they say, “Are you an Aryan?” And he says, “Yes.” And right after he says it, he’s very upset, he’s disappointed in himself. He hates what he did. He’s like, “I had that moment when I should have stood up and done something right and I failed to do it.” And he’s beating himself up over it. But in the moment, that’s what he did.

That night he goes to the cabaret, and he sees a comedian called Werner Fink, who was a vaudevillian performer at the time. And I just want to read this passage from the book, because this speaks to the power of comedy:

This minor cabaret master of ceremonies has his place in the annals of the Third Reich, indeed one of the very few places of honor there. He did not look like a hero, but if he finally became something like one, it was in spite of himself. He was not a revolutionary actor, had no biting satire. He was not David with a sling. His character was at bottom harmless and amiable, his wit gentle, light and capricious. His jokes were based on double entendre and puns, which he handled like a virtuoso. He had invented something that could be called the hidden punchline. Indeed, as time went on, it became more and more necessary for him to hide his punchlines, but he did not conceal his opinions. His act remained full of harmless amiability in a country where these qualities were on the liquidation list. This harmless amiability hid a kernel of real, indomitable courage. He dared to speak openly about the reality of the Nazis, and that in the middle of Germany. His spiel contained references to concentration camps, the raids on people’s homes, the general fear and general lies. He spoke of these things with infinitely quiet mockery, melancholy and sadness. Listening to him was extraordinarily comforting.

This March 31st was perhaps his greatest evening. The house was full of people staring at the next day as if into an abyss. Fink made them laugh as I have never heard an audience laugh. It was dramatic laughter, the laughter of a newborn defiance, throwing off numbness and desperation, feeding off the present danger. It was a miracle that the S.A. had not long since arrived to arrest everybody there. On this evening, we would probably have gone on laughing in the police vans.

Werner Fink.

The power of comedy! Reading that—and again, it’s not the same thing; George Bush isn’t the Nazi—but that feeling, when I was watching Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was similar to that, right? You felt good about it. Like, finally somebody’s doing the right thing here—and it’s funny. It means our artfulness can really get at these people.

And I think that’s what bothers me about the South Park thing. It doesn’t have that level of amiability. I think that’s the word. You know, it’s not good-natured. And I think we really have to keep that in mind now, as we go forward, because the temptation to be mean and cruel is going to be greater and greater as we go along.

The United States right now is very much like Germany in 1933, by the way. It’s not exactly the same, but there are enough similarities that it’s very, very chilling to read this book, even though it’s a great book. It’s very well written, very well analyzed. Haffner is brilliant.

But, you know, that’s where we are.

We’re not even in Idiocracy! There’s another comedy. People often say, “This is Idiocracy.” Yes, in some ways it is, because the film Ass, which wins 12 Academy Awards, including best screenplay, and it’s just a picture of a guy’s ass for two hours, in Idiocracy—that’s something that maybe would come out of this very, very low level of quote unquote comedy.

But even in Idiocracy, President Camacho is, first of all, the smartest guy there, and second of all, cares about the American people. He has a lot of other things going on, but he does care. He does want to help everybody and make the problems go away because he wants to do his job. That’s the difference between President Camacho and Trump. Trump doesn’t care about people. He doesn’t care about his job. He just cares about golfing and making sure that we don’t know what’s in those Epstein files.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that and kind of talk through it, because it’s making me feel strange. Even with my own little parody songs, it seems like we’re getting into this phase now where they’re not “funny” anymore. They’re something different, and I’m not even sure exactly what it is.

So I just have to—even as a reminder to myself—make sure not to lose the amiability. Because that’s what makes us human, and that’s what makes all of this worth saving, right?

Anyway, I hope that everybody had a good week while I was gone. I hope everyone has a nice weekend. I hope August is better than July. And you know, we shall prevail!

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TONIGHT!

After three weeks away, LB and I return together for The Five 8, your Friday night hang. Please join us LIVE at 8pm ET: