Class Act

You’re a dutiful father, deeply concerned about your celebrity daughter’s health, happiness, and security. What do you do? What else? You start a self-serving, semi-literate, center-aligned, homophobic blog publicly slamming your daughter’s life. Certainly that will bring Lindsey back into the fold.

Kevin James: Method Actor

I haven’t seen last week’s box office champ Paul Blart: Mall Cop, but why should that prevent me from treating it with utter disdain and condescension?

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Faced with Loss of Bush, Comedy Writers Demand Bailout

The nation’s beleaguered comedy writers, facing both the weakest economy in decades and the devastating loss of easy comedic fodder due to the end of the Bush Administration, have lobbied the Obama Administration for a $50 billion bailout. “It’s a perfect storm of unfunny,” said Dave “Chuckles” Champo, spokesperson for the Comedy Writers Association, the industry’s powerful trade group. “Grownups are in charge of the government again, and, while perhaps necessary to repair this shattered nation, that’s just not particularly funny. What are we supposed to riff on? Obama’s a lefty? Right. Um, Obama signed a bill today but it didn’t become law because no one could decipher his signature. Ba-dum-bump! That’s hilarious. Seriously, these writers need help.”

Mr. Champo continued, “We do not make this request lightly. As professional comedians, we are trained to spin comedy gold from the thinnest of straw, but this is ridiculous. We not only lost the big guns, Bush and Cheney, we also lost a lot of crucial secondary players. We lost the Gonzalezes, the Rummys, the Roves, the Rices. Hey, one Brownie could feed a family of four for six months. And they’re gone, all gone. Need I mention the fortunes lost due to Vice President Sarah Palin? The mind reels. And now, to top it all off, Britney Spears is wearing underpants again. How much worse can it get?”

However, Mr. Champo’s pleas appear to be falling on deaf ears. When contacted for comment, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson responded with the following statement, “While we appreciate the difficulties faced by these hardworking Americans due to the loss of comedic material (and there’s certainly no “funny business” in my handling of the current economic crisis), we do not currently have the budget to fund this bailout. May I suggest that these comedians instead follow the example set during our last Great Depression by the likes of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Mae West, and work that much harder to bring a smile to the face of a grateful nation.”

In lieu of a direct bailout, Mr. Paulson provided something he described as even more valuable, a handwritten list of humorous topics for struggling writers, which is reproduced in its entirety below.

Henry Paulson’s List of Potentially Humorous Topics for Struggling Comedy Writers

1. Black people do it like this; white people do it like this.
2. Paris Hilton is quite sexually promiscuous, and also her acting leaves much to be desired.
3. Parody versions of currently popular songs (e.g., “Eat It” or “Like a Surgeon”).
4. Rediscover the lost arts of miming and/or juggling.
5. What part of the chicken is the McNugget?
6. Kirstie Allie is overweight (so e.g., could be depicted eating large or unlikely items to comedic effect).
7. What’s the deal with my cellphone? It’s always beeping.
8. Dumb people who have committed crimes (i.e., Knuckleheads in the News).
9. Newspaper headlines that say unintentionally humorous things.
10. Amy Winehouse is often “under-the-influence” in public.
11. Two words: Knock Knock.
12. The Rolling Stones are on tour. Boy, are those guys old.
13. Pratfalls never go out of style.
14. Lastly, never forget: Bush in Retirement.

New Lessons in Abasement

Where does one begin? The Republican party continues its long, slow, relentless disintegration from Lords of the Known Universe into something resembling a frightened band of kittens battling a yarn ball.

Our first exhibit is Republican Congressman Phil Gingrey from Georgia’s 11th district. Yesterday, in this article in Politico, Gingrey responded to Rush Limbaugh’s criticism of the Republican leadership with this statement, “I mean, it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows and you’re living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of that thing. But when it comes to true leadership, not that these people couldn’t be or wouldn’t be good leaders, they’re not in that position of John Boehner or Mitch McConnell.”

Seems reasonable, no? Gingrey is saying that it’s easy to criticize from the outside, but that actually making policy is the difficult part. Hardly a manifesto. Well, even that level of frankness is just not allowed in today’s Republican party. Watch the clip below as Gingrey calls in to Rush’s show today to apologize for any offense he may have caused the great man with is intemperate comments. In particular, watch Rush’s expression from about 0:55 to 1:05 as a US Congressman grovels at his feet for forgiveness and absolution.

And if that performance weren’t demeaning enough, Gingrey also posted an apology to Rush and his fans on his web page. Rumor has it he also sent Rush chocolates and lingerie.

But it gets better. Today, Chris Mathews had Dick Armey and Salon editor Joan Walsh on Hardball to discuss the Rush/Gingrey dustup. Take a look at how Dick “Pure Class” Armey treats Walsh in this clip.

“I’m so damn glad that you could never be my wife, ‘cos I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that prattle from you every day.” Not only is this statement offensive, it’s also absurd, because everyone knows that Dick Armey’s wife’s name is Vagina Coastguard.

By the way, this short clip doesn’t come close to conveying the utter pomposity and prickishness that Armey displays throughout the exchange. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on this segment of Hardball, which lasted 11 minutes 42 seconds. Of that total time, Chris Mathews spoke for 3:25, or 28% of the time; Dick Armey spoke for 4:37, or 38% of the time; and Joan Walsh spoke for 2:02, or 18% of the time. So Armey spoke more than twice as long as Walsh, including one span in which he spoke uninterrupted for 52 seconds and another in which he spoke uniterupted for 47 seconds. Walsh, on the other hand, was interrupted nearly every time she spoke, and when she wasn’t being directly interrupted, Armey was slowly shaking his head in disbelief like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Someone criticizing the current state of the economy?! And a little woman, no less? Absurd. Simply absurd. See the whole exchange here.

Hipster Pod

For the record (imagine this bit being delivered in the voice of the Simpson’s Comic Book Guy), I happen to actually like Velvet Underground, Yo La Tengo, and Wilco.

Rabbit at Rest

“A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.”

– John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009)

The Terrible Toll of the Downturn

The current recession is leading to truly heartbreaking stories. First we hear that Citi has been forced by the Obama administration to  cancel its order for that $50 million private jet, leading to the distinct possibility that it’s bailout-munching executives may be forced to fly commercial first class to their ski getaways.

Oh the humanity!

But it gets worse. Now the New York Post reports that Merrill Lynch’s disgraced former CEO John Thain, he of the $87K rug, has been reduced to drinking tap water with his dinner.

Thain . . . was having dinner at San Pietro last week with BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink. He loudly told the waiter, for all to hear, “under the circumstances with this tough economy, I think I’ll have tap water.”

Lest we forget, this brave, intrepid rug-buyer was one of John McCain’s top economic advisers and was on track for a position in the administration if his boy won. Now this? When will this madness end?

These are the flowcharts of our lives

Cracked has cornered the market on rendering celebrity’s lives in flowchart form. Two favorites are below; other admirable entries can be found here.

You’re So Thain

Ah, this whole $87 K rug thing just gets better and better. Talking Points Memo has their list of John Thain’s Top Ten Greatest Moments. My favorite is number five.

5. The In-Retrospect-Ill-Advised Ski Trip

In mid December, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis learns that Merrill’s fourth quarter losses will be much larger than expected. Lewis gets the bad news not from Thain himself, but from the transition team handling the merger — perhaps because, after the losses surface, Thain takes off for his ski house in Vail. (A “person familiar with the matter” tells the Journal, hilariously, that Thain was “working and available” while in Vail.)

In his defense, it really tied the room together

Shocking news out of Wall Street! Merrill Lynch boss John Thain spent $87,000 on a rug, part of an office redecoration that cost $1.22 million, all while the firm was going bankrupt.

Do I even need to say it? That rug really tied the room together.

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