Krusing and Boozing

Colleen Kruse used to be a modestly serviceable comic. The bulk of her schtick has always (as I remember it) been to beat her audience over the head with PC cliches about...Colleen Kruse "Teenage Single Mom! Waitress! Woman in a Man's Racket!". As the City Pages said about her, The comedian is a product of working-class East St. Paul, teenage single motherhood, and a tour at Mickey's Diner. Those experiences have put her, as she declares onstage in thigh-high boots, "in touch with her inner motherfucker." Whether talking about her young son's pride in his erect penis or her day job in restaurants, Kruse is more interested in observational storytelling than one-liners". In other words, humor tailor-made for "This American Life".

She's managed to insinuate herself into the local writing crowd; she's reviewing books for the Strib now.

I can't tell what stands out the most about her review of Al Franken's new book, Icky Poopy Conservatives and Why I Hate Them: Ms. Kruse's fluence with strawmen, or the casual stupidity of her hatred.

Both are in evidence: Fluency with strawmen:

There's an adage generally attributed to Mark Twain: "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on." (He would have loved AM talk radio.)

and casually-stupid hatred:

On the other hand, if you play your Friday night game of cribbage with Grandma using an FBI's Most Wanted Deck just in case, you're going to want to fire up your Hummer 2 and motor on down to the union-busting mall bookseller, plunk down your $24.95 and see what you're up against. Because you've got to keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

Oh, yeah; Kruse thinks Franken is a cogent, on-point commentator:

Franken has been keeping a very close watch on his opponents, including Fox News shouter Bill O'Reilly, instapundit Ann Coulter [Note to Ms. Kruse: vide Instapundit. Don't make me come back there], former CBS correspondent turned media critic Bernard Goldberg, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch. With detailed, and often searingly funny footnotes, he deconstructs their writings and public utterances for maximum embarrassment value.

He catches O'Reilly boasting that the tabloid TV show "Inside Edition" won two prestigious Peabody journalism awards while he was on the staff. Never happened. He dings Coulter for research methods that wouldn't fly in a community college debate class.

Ms. Kruse; I'll toss O'Reilly over the transom if you do the same for Begala or Carville.

I'll be waiting.

Franken is brilliant at converting actual, factual quotes from our very own public servants and powerbrokers into wry commentary by simply affording them the relative calm of the printed page, rather than shouting over a media host's screaming agenda.

Where I come from, we call that "Taking the writer out of context". Note to Ms. Kruse; Franken's famous for it.

Of course, Franken's fact-finding can be fallible, too. He makes a mistake when he attributes an article that appeared in the Star Tribune to "Mpls./St. Paul Magazine (the weekend magazine of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)" But that's error, not deliberate deception.

Right.

And Franken's reflexive support of a president that lied under oath? That was...hep me, here?

Readers who pick up "Lies" simply expecting a laugh will find the joke's on them. The joke is, this is no joke. Franken's sardonic critique of our culture of political disinformation is serious business, and there's a lengthy chapter on the Wellstone memorial controversy to prove it.

Ms. Kruse: What Mr. Franken proves is that he's as bald-faced a spin doctor as a Carville, without half the entertainment value.

Like any pro comic, Franken doesn't shy from any subject. He's thoughtful and thorough, and not always side-splitting.

He's a cheap shot artist who specializes in out-of-context japes that, often as not, fall apart under detailed scrutiny, not that anyone cares to scrutinize the pathetic, publicity-whoring has-been.

By the way, Ms. Kruse; about your writing. I read this bit here, and I'm getting concerned:

But a lot of the time, he is. Enough of the time, he is.

Much of the time, you're better than that. Some of the time, you're better than that.

It would have been unseemly for him to have paced his laughs in any other way. They would have become the point of the book rather than its highlight and saving grace. Franken has built this finger-pointing book to be sturdy and interesting, no matter which side of the capital-gains tax break you butter your bread on.

Actually, I rather suspect you'd have to be sitting on Ms. Kruse's side of that issue, holding a wedge of Brie and a glass of Chablis with her and Al and Lori Sturdevant for all I know, to find it (if my skimming is any indication) anything but a has-been's painful attempt to cash in on a brief flash of outsider-hip cred.

But then Colleen Kruse probably thinks Molly Ivins is an incisive commentator, too...

Posted by Mitch at September 3, 2003 06:28 AM