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When it comes to political jokers, David Letterman beats Jay Leno and critics’ darling Jon Stewart hands down.
It makes sense that the late-night talk-show wars, just passing their 10-year anniversary, would continue to consume audience interest. With each passing day, David Letterman — who seems to have developed a comfort level at CBS, even as he continues to make ironic detachment a way of life for several generations of fans — becomes ever more honest and human, allowing for a darker, more mature side to his comic’s take on life. More grounded than the competition, there’s genuine power to his words, particularly since his recovery from heart surgery.
Jay Leno, meanwhile, remains the guy who will do anything for ratings, most obviously when it involves some degree of political partisanship, like the kind that gave Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recall-candidacy, last year, the shove it needed to take California’s governorship.
In a recent article published in L.A. Weekly, Nikke Finke (an archive of her work is available as a link, to your left, under Cinema) writes …
Late Show has the brass balls to go where the cowardly White House news corps and corporate suck-up Leno fear to tread: presenting Dubya in all his dumb-ass glory.
Finke’s article is well worth a read.
As always, Slate continues to publish regular Bushisms, a malaprop version of the U.S. president’s accidental wit and wisdom.
When the Americans started officially bombing Baghdad last year, I emailed the head writer of the Tonight Show (Joe something) regarding what I perceived as the show’s deliberate design to villify Iraqis and to soften up the public for the war; that this made the Show co-responsible for the war.
He denied this of course, very crudely, too. But out of the blue he wrote that no one pulled their strings or told them what to write. It seemed to suggest that Karl Rove and the White House does give these scumbags orders. What is worse than a comedian who uses humour to villify innocent people?