Politically Incompetent
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Politically Incompetent The Talk Show to End All Talk Shows (Alas) By Andrew Ferguson Let's stipulate right at the outset that there's no people like show people, but I don't think it's a news...
...He knew, as the audience knew, that the opinionizing guest was violating an unwritten compact of traditional show biz: We agreed to listen to the guest sing or tell jokes or drop anecdotes about his dear friend "Dick" Burton, and in return the guest agreed to shut up when it came to anything serious...
...But when it comes to the higher human faculty that adults outside Hollywood call ratiocination, the ability to have sequential thoughts that flow logically one from another, show people are like no people I know...
...Maher is fully aware of this kind of criticism and waves it aside...
...There were always moments on the old Tonight Show when a guest—Rod Steiger, say, or Tony Curtis—would straighten his back without warning and grow dangerously thoughtful, launching an unbidden discourse on some hefty topic of the day: Vietnam, nuclear energy, race relations...
...not you, Comedy Boy.'" But Comedy Boy has other concerns...
...Five nights a week he and his bookers bring to a Los Angeles studio a quartet of guests: not merely twinkies from the world of show biz, but also Washington pundits and policy wonks, professional pols, the authors of self-help books and other potboilers, foam-flecked radio-talk-show hosts, and such unclassifiables as Kato Kaelin and Arianna Huffing-ton...
...I don't think anybody should force anybody to do anything...
...Commercial television is only a half-century old, but in the dog years of pop culture, five decades constitute a millennium, and thus many people have come to mythologize a dimly receding golden age of TV...
...I mean, but it's like our world is becoming so exposed that we are seeing that everyone is, like, as weird as you—or I mean myself...
...And here—and then I'll stop, I promise—here is Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Maher introduces an issue for discussion by reading a smattering of facts off an index card prepared by his staff...
...Of course, who needs Charo when you can get a genuine Ph.D...
...There are incidents of explosive freakishness...
...Houston's analysis was infinitely more thoughtful and allusive than what you normally hear on PI...
...The ensuing minutes were invariably cringe-inducing, as Carson tried to shush the fulminations...
...News, "if this show could in some way help make an interest in current affairs cool...
...They think that I have no business interloping on their area...
...The tone would be indignant, smug, bellicose, and, shall we say, less than thoroughly informed...
...like Jean Houston, the California mystic best known for putting Mrs...
...Houston said, "of wounding, of death...
...Everyone sees himself as a victim, which takes away from people who are real victims...
...Maher claims this honored lineage for PI...
...The show's host is a former second-tier comic called Bill Maher...
...Clinton in touch with Eleanor Roosevelt...
...What did he do, exactly...
...he even has Carson's mannerisms, though he seems fonder of masturbation jokes than Carson was...
...And he really does believe there's meat on his show's bone, if you'll forgive the expression...
...Politically Incorrect can be excruciating to watch...
...With the exception of Nightline, PI is unquestionably the most popular chat show about politics now on the air, with almost as many viewers than This Week and Meet the Press combined...
...They think, 'We're the ones who sit around and talk about national affairs...
...Since everyone's opinion is inherently as valuable as everyone else's, the effort that goes into constructing an informed opinion—reading a book, say, or even a newspaper—is simply superfluous, a mug's game, a diversion for dorks...
...Here, for example, is the actor/writer/singer/boytoy Dweezil Zappa, son of the late and more conventionally named Frank, chewing over the case of a Vietnam-era deserter who escaped to Canada and recently requested amnesty: "I mean, it's so long ago, this war, because to me, like I was born in 1969, and so this whole thing to me, obviously, I was not around to feel the, you know, emotional fervor of what everyone was, like, experiencing on both sides of this war, so to me, at this point, I don't see that any major punishment is necessary...
...These altercations can be perversely entertaining—who among us wouldn't like to see Chevy Chase get beaten up?—but they are relatively rare...
...Not Maher—although he'd like to be the thinking man's comedian, a Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce, simultaneously hip and well informed...
...No less an authority than TV Guide has called it "the best talk show on tele-vision"—think of it: better than Sally Jesse, better than Charles Grodin—and its unexpectedly strong ratings suggest that much of late-night America agrees...
...Now people sue over everything," he said in a Playboy interview this summer...
...Nobody seemed to know...
...This is a new story for humankind...
...Self-satisfaction is the primary trait of Maher's on-air persona...
...When Kato Kaelin praises your intellect and Ralph Nader admires your sense of humor, you're bound to get a swelled head...
...It would all be worth it," he told U.S...
...He hates the National Endowment for the Arts and the rise of the "victim culture...
...He's pro-choice and pro-death penalty...
...This is not good news for politics...
...Ralph Nader calls him "a first-rate social satirist...
...Bill Maher has taken political talk about as far as it can go—as far down or as far out, depending on your taste...
...The Washington media establishment hates me," Maher told U.S...
...Politically, Maher's instincts are libertarian, with a rightward tilt—the cut-the-crap views of the vaguely ticked-off American male...
...All are meant to provoke Dweezil Zappa, or Tom Arnold, or Bob Dornan, or another of Maher's frequent guests to thoughtful and amusing comment...
...A show-biz personage bitching about Vietnam was a breach of etiquette, a belch at the dinner party...
...This is surely helpful, because it quickly becomes clear that at least half his guests on any given night haven't read a newspaper since the Gulf War...
...Politically Incorrect may not be mainstream America's cup of tea," says Maher...
...Surrounded by idiots, he knows he can't help but look smart...
...There's a lot more meat on our bone," Maher told Entertainment Weekly, "stuff for people to think about...
...The night after this year's Emmys telecast, Maher brought together Joan Rivers, the actress Lea Thompson, a TV producer named Dick Wolf, and the Washington journalist Terry Jeffrey...
...Before Jeffrey could press his argument further, Joan Rivers shot out of her chair, hopped across the set, kissed Lea Thompson with a maximum of slobber, and then turned to make goo-goo eyes at Terry Jeffrey...
...Bill is an intellectual who doesn't let it be known," says Kato Kaelin...
...The bimbo from Baywatch will top the pocket-protector geek from D.C...
...He calls himself a "reluctant conservative"—a conservative, that is, who wears Armani suits and tells interviewers how much he enjoys masturbation...
...Imagine now a half-hour's worth of such moments, night after night...
...But is it the same thing as losing a leg fighting for your country...
...Inevitably, television critics have ranged from calling the show "The McLaughlin Group after a few beers" to "The McLaughlin Group on acid...
...That's a victim...
...More often, to judge by the dozen or so shows I've watched on tape the past few days, the pace is plodding, as host and guests struggle to figure out what it is they're talking about...
...On your average boring political talk show, the host can be relied on to referee such confusions...
...George magazine says that PI "wants to change the way Americans view politics," and Maher seems to agree...
...So why now, suddenly, why are we going to do some special thing now and say we're all equal...
...In the cool world of Politically Incorrect, the values of show biz must trump the values of politics: argument, appeals to history, the mustering of facts...
...The exhibitionist comic Sarah Bernhard once spat at the right-wing newsletter-writer John Lofton, for example, and the TV producer Steven Bochco once threatened to punch out Chevy Chase...
...wildly creative at lighting a tableau or making the camera jitter the way it does on ER...
...Maher is right to claim the old Tonight Show as a progenitor, though not in the way he thinks...
...Had enough...
...Who won, by the way...
...Jeffrey was a good sport about it—I suppose he didn't have much choice—but there was no question who won the moment: game, set, and match to the lady with the facelift...
...ingenious in the mystical arts of marketing and dispersing royalties...
...TV critics tend not to have a wide range...
...The roundtables on PIoffer a perfect illustration...
...After the monologue Maher seats his guests in leather arm chairs on a set ringed with Ionic columns and pelts them with subjects for discussion...
...This is a pretty typical PI line-up: a comic, a cutie, a Hollywood powerhouse, and, from Washington, a single person who knows what he's talking about and who becomes, perforce, a bizarre curiosity and figure of fun...
...I'd have Charo on [the show]," Maher told Playboy...
...Anybody in a democracy has the right to vote and therefore should have the right to an opinion...
...PI follows Nightline on ABC...
...An active curiosity about the world of public affairs demands that you take things seriously, or at least semi-seriously, and seriousness in our ironic age is the very antithesis of the cool sensibility...
...From the caveman days, they kind of take care of people, the children and the women they took special care of, through the Greeks, the Romans, through who knows, whatever, through revolutions...
...They can be magnificent at dancing, singing, telling jokes, or emoting...
...Too brainy...
...Maher, the student of '50s and '60s TV talk, has made them the premise of his show—a kind of "Worst of Carson" in concentrated form...
...Here, for another example, is the actress Sally Kellerman on the tribulations of Marv Albert: "Oh, man, I never wanted to be somebody who sits around and is laughing, because it is so sad...
...Given a choice between being cool and cultivating an interest in current affairs, Americans choose cool...
...Some are large and serious (welfare reform), some are jokey ("Should politicians steal a little...
...Jeffrey began by making an intelligent point about the inadequacy of the TV ratings system, citing the moral squalor of the Emmys show as an example: Accepting an award, Ellen DeGeneres had used the broadcast to advance her case for the delights of lesbianism...
...And he's likely right...
...Then clearly you are not one of the millions of viewers who enjoy Politically Incorrect, the political talk show from which all of the above quotes are taken...
...He has said the show is a throwback to pre-Leno talk shows, when Johnny Carson and Jack Paar would mix the gags with serious palaver among an eclectic panel of guests...
...others are lifted from the morning headlines...
...This was a kind of passion play," Dr...
...the producer and director Garry Marshall, the creator of Happy Days, on the Family and Medical Leave Act: "It's the times, it's the nineties, it's the time when you have kids you get benefits...
...Though he demurs that PI is primarily entertainment, he holds more elevated ambitions for it, too...
...An interest in current affairs" isn't cool—cannot be cool, in fact...
...Politically Incompetent The Talk Show to End All Talk Shows (Alas) By Andrew Ferguson Let's stipulate right at the outset that there's no people like show people, but I don't think it's a news flash to point out, in addition, that show people are pretty dumb...
...The audience bellowed and guffawed, Maher cut to a commercial, and the discussion was over...
...God knows I hate to sound uncool, but there's a slight problem here...
...Repeat that sentence to yourself, and shudder for your country...
...She appeared on PI after the death of Princess Di...
...Gene McK-inney's alleged sexual misconduct...
...He gives off a trace of uplift when he speaks of his show's "small contribution" to rousing the slumbering American public from its apathy...
...Politically Incorrect is too brainy for America...
...every time...
...Wasn't it consensual...
...one guest asked Maher, after the host raised the subject of Sgt...
...Discussions tend to fizzle out...
...But it was still stupid...
...And indeed Maher opens the show with a monologue straight out of the Carson play-book...
...The show is a hit but not a blockbuster...
...I remember reading about the many 'victims of silicone implants.' I'm sorry for women who had a bad tit job...
...And then she resurrects herself, and she creates a new world where she goes out and she's vulnerable and available, and she allows others to be vulnerable and available...
...News, "and I'm not fond of them...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 7
