While I think that Stephen Colbert will likely dramatically change the tired format of late night TV talk shows and bring a new energy to it, I will miss his skewering of people like Bill O’Reilly, like the one below he did a few weeks ago.
[Read more…]
The flip side of the US’s obsession with preserving the death penalty despite all its well-documented horrors is its obsession with the idea that the more that people carry powerful guns everywhere all the time, the safer they will be. Coupled with expanded ‘stand your ground’ and ‘castle doctrine’ legislation that enables people make much broader claims of self-defense, this has even led people to set traps for burglars, tempting them to enter their homes so that they could kill them.
[Read more…]
CNN must be dreading to watch The Daily Show because, next to Fox News, Jon Stewart seems to enjoy taking shots at them for their descent into mindless coverage of non-news. It seems like he expects them to be better than they are while he has no hope for Fox.
[Read more…]
Jon Stewart devoted three segments to discuss the issue of racism that has suddenly flooded the media.
First up, he gave his take on the Donald Sterling story, since that seems to be the topic du jour and is the third time I am discussing it today.
[Read more…]
Sean Hannity is the next sacrificial lamb to be slaughtered for ignoring my advice to avoid taking on Jon Stewart. These people never seem to learn that standup comedians with their own TV show and writers can always get the last devastating word.
[Read more…]
In order to try and build up buzz for the new show, HBO has out the entire first episode of Jon Olver’s new show Last Week Tonight on YouTube that you can see here. It seems to be similar to The Daily Show in style. To his credit, Oliver covered the Indian election currently going on, something ignored by much American media, and he excoriated them for it. He also covered the POM Wonderful v. Coca-Cola Supreme Court case in which there are no good guys.
[Read more…]
As long-time readers know, I am a sucker for parodies and if there was one set of films that were just begging to be mocked in that way, it has to be the Matrix series. I saw only the first one and while the special effects were fun, the story made little sense and its earnest attempts at philosophizing were so risible that I decided not to see anymore. I tend to avoid sequels anyway.
[Read more…]
Cliven Bundy, the rancher who thinks that he has a right to have his cattle graze on public property for free while also looking down on African-Americans as people who might have been better off as slaves rather than on welfare, is the gift for comedy that does not stop giving, mainly because he will not stop talking.
[Read more…]
With the announcement that Stephen Colbert will leave his current show and replace David Letterman as the host of CBS’s The Late Show, there has been speculation of what he will do in his new venue and what Comedy Central will place in his time slot. Of course, Colbert going on broadcast TV, the supposedly mainstream entertainment channels, has made his right-wing enemies apoplectic as a further sign of traditional values being destroyed, with Rush Limbaugh fuming that “CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America. No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservatism. Now it’s just wide out in the open.”
[Read more…]
The Daily Show uses the absurd fuss over the news of the future birth of Hillary Clinton’s grandchild to examine how differently the media scrutinize male and female politicians. Although the clips are funny, it is not really a laughing matter. Talking of laughing matters, do people recall the time when she was running for president in 2007 and there was a period of intense focus on the way she laughed and whether it was an unbecoming cackle? It was ludicrous.
[Read more…]