{"id":71169,"date":"2019-04-26T11:00:33","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T16:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=71169"},"modified":"2019-04-26T06:59:03","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T11:59:03","slug":"the-atlantic-like-reading-shot-in-the-dark-years-after-the-fact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=71169","title":{"rendered":"<i>The Atlantic<\/i>:  Like Reading Shot In The Dark Years After The Fact"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Sometime back around the time Steven Colbert got a job on late-night TV, late night TV stopped being funny. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, funny in the conventional sense, meaning &#8220;it arouses some kind of amused reaction from me&#8221;.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it&#8217;s not a political thing; I laughed at Dennis Miller just as hard when he was a smug liberal as I do now that he&#8217;s a 9\/11 conservative of sorts. His <em>White Album<\/em> &#8211; a one-hour monologue from 25-odd years ago &#8211; is no less funny than it was when it came out.  I didn&#8217;t laugh any harder at Norm MacDonald after his low-key and sometimes incongruous conservatism started coming out &#8211; he&#8217;s just a comic genius.  Chris Rock, Dennis Leary, Sam Kinison &#8211; all of them are hilarious, and to some degree or another way, way to my left.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There may be no greater litmus test of American social views than one&#8217;s opinion of Michelle Wolf&#8217;s &#8220;comic&#8221; routine at last year&#8217;s White House Correspondents&#8217; Dinner.   Most people think it was pretty dreadful &#8211; but the consensus among NPR hosts for the past year has been pretty rapturous.  (The free market spoke loud and clear &#8211; her Netflix talk show flamed out faster than the sales curve on a Mick Jagger solo album). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Judge for yourself:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/L8IYPnnsYJw\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p>The noted conservative tool Andrew Ferguson, and that noted conservative fishwrap <em>The Atlantic<\/em>, calls it out&#8230;:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>There had been lots of anti-Trump demonstrations lately, Wolf noted, with protesters carrying homemade signs. How many signs? \u201cPoster board is flying off the shelves faster than Robert Mueller can say, \u2018You\u2019ve been subpoenaed!\u2019\u201d If there\u2019s humor in Paul Ryan\u2019s circumcision\u2014and I\u2019m willing to be persuaded\u2014she failed to find it. Chris Christie, Wolf suggested, was fat. She provided her own kind of abortion counseling: If you do terminate a pregnancy, she advised, motioning oddly with her elbow, \u201cyou\u2019ve gotta get that baby outa there.\u201d At her last line she leaned intimately into the microphone: \u201cFlint still doesn\u2019t have clean water.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;among many examples of the complete death of comedy.  He refers to late night TV &#8211; but I&#8217;m pretty sure it&#8217;s all of pop culture; political &#8220;comedy&#8221;, at least as understood by mainstream popular culture, is dead.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometime back around the time Steven Colbert got a job on late-night TV, late night TV stopped being funny. Well, funny in the conventional sense, meaning &#8220;it arouses some kind of amused reaction from me&#8221;. And it&#8217;s not a political thing; I laughed at Dennis Miller just as hard when he was a smug liberal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71171,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71169\/revisions\/71171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}