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    Is there humour left in the White House? – podcast

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    The annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner returns this Saturday for a night of comedy ‘roasting’ – where the great and the good are ruthlessly mocked in celebration of the freedom of the press.
    In recent years, however, the night has taken on a different tone, with the atmosphere of warm self-deprecation and bipartisan bonhomie replaced by something more scathing and serious.
    This week Jonathan Freedland is joined by Jeff Nussbaum, a former senior speech writer to Joe Biden, to discuss the art of writing gags for presidents and whether there is still space for humour in US politics.

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      The nepo baby who made good: Rob Reiner on Trump, family – and his brilliant, beloved movies

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      Where to even start preparing for a Rob Reiner interview? You could rewatch his classic films, of course, namely that phenomenal eight-year streak that started with This Is Spinal Tap in 1984 and blazed through The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery and A Few Good Men. But even that is barely scratching the surface of a career that first got going in the late 1960s. What about his years as a household name in 70s sitcoms, or his famous comic actor father, Carl, or his unique childhood, in which Mel Brooks and other entertainment luminaries would be frequent guests in the house? And what about the political activism that saw him play important roles in overturning the same-sex marriage ban in California and funnelling higher taxes on cigarettes into programmes for young children and prenatal care?And, of course, what about the stuff he’s still making, because at 76 Reiner is showing no signs of slowing down. There’s a Spinal Tap sequel in the works, not to mention the reason he’s speaking to me today: a documentary about the rise of Christian nationalism in America. God and Country is chilling but vital viewing, dissecting a movement that has infiltrated American politics and the Republican party to such a degree that Reiner believes it could soon bring about the end of democracy in the US – and potentially the world. Does he really mean that?“Yes,” he says without a pause when we connect over a video link from New Orleans. “The question at this election is: do we want to continue 249 years of self-rule and American democracy? Or do we want to turn it over to somebody like Donald Trump who has said that he wants to destroy the constitution, go after his political enemies and turn America into an autocracy? We see autocracy making its move around the world. And so if we crumble, there’s a danger that democracy crumbles around the world.”View image in fullscreenGod and Country covers how the Christian nationalist movement began to gain traction in the 1970s when it latched on to abortion as a focal issue. Back then, evangelicals were not especially partisan about the supreme court’s landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, still largely believing in the separation of church and state enshrined within the US constitution. But through huge funding and smart organisation, abortion was successfully turned into a key religious issue, and the idea began to take shape that democracy itself was an obstacle to God’s plans. In the documentary we see the effects of this: churches turned into partisan political cells, preachers inciting hatred against Democrats, and even tales of pastors carrying guns to their sermons. This brewing violence reached its zenith on 6 January 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC.“And the foundation for it all was Christian nationalism,” says Reiner, “because finally they had found somebody like Donald Trump who they could funnel their ideas through.”The irony of all this, of course, is that Trump is the least Christian guy you could ever expect to meet. “I think he can probably spell the word ‘bible’,” agrees Reiner. “I don’t think he’s ever read it and I don’t think he has any idea what’s in it. But they excuse all that by saying God works in mysterious ways, and that he sent us this flawed vessel by which we can achieve the goals that we want to achieve.”Reiner was a keen Biden supporter in 2020, and despite the criticism around the incumbent president’s age – he will be weeks away from turning 82 when November swings around – this support hasn’t wavered.“Look, he’s old!” says Reiner, who despite his palpable anger still delivers his rants with comedic zeal, as if the world has gone mad and he’s the last sane person standing. “But you have one guy who stumbles around, whatever. And another guy who’s a criminal, basically lies every minute of his life, has been indicted 91 times!”View image in fullscreenReiner’s hatred of Trump was shared by his father, who had a burning desire to live long enough to see him defeated in 2020. As it happened, Carl died a few months before the election, aged 98. “The man he wanted ended up winning,” says Reiner. “What I don’t think he would have ever believed is that Trump would come back again. It’s like a zombie or a cockroach.”Liberal politics was always at the forefront of the Reiner household. In the 1950s, the FBI came to their house to ask Carl if he knew any members of the Communist party. “He said: ‘I probably do, but if I did I wouldn’t tell you.’” Meanwhile, his mum, the actor and singer Estelle Reiner (who died in 2008), was an organiser of Another Mother for Peace, a group opposed to the Vietnam war. “You know how people talk about remembering where they were when Kennedy died? Well, I remember where I was when [civil rights activist] Medgar Evers died [in June 1963], because my parents were very active in the civil rights movement.”Their influence on him is clear: Reiner went on to make 1996’s Ghosts of Mississippi, a movie about the trial of Evers’s killer. Of course, these days, with his gilded roots, Reiner would have faced accusations of being a “nepo baby”, which seems a funny thing to level at a 76-year-old man, but he takes it well.“If you’re a nepo baby, doors will open,” he says. “But you have to deliver. If you don’t deliver, the door will close just as fast as it opened.”View image in fullscreenReiner says his kids are dealing with it now. “My son is 32 and my daughter’s 26. They both want careers, they’re both talented. Should I lean into it? Should I back away from it? They’re confused. I said, once they find their own path, it won’t matter. I was very conscious when I was carrying out my career that I didn’t rely on [my dad]. I didn’t ask him for money, and if you know in your heart that what you’re doing is true, you can block out all that stuff.”Reiner often speaks warmly about his relationship with his dad, but although it was always loving, it wasn’t always easy. I remark on how central characters in Reiner’s films often wrestle with such relationships – Tom Cruise’s Lt Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men was tormented by the powerful reputation of his father; Stand By Me’s Gordie felt ignored and misunderstood by his. He nods. “I loved my father and he loved me,” he says, “but as a kid growing up, I don’t think he understood me. I was odd to him and I don’t think he quite got me. And so that comes out in those films, particularly in Stand By Me.”When Reiner was eight, the late family friend and legendary sitcom writer Norman Lear told Carl how funny his son was, to which Carl apparently replied: “That kid? I don’t know. He’s a sullen child.” Another actor, Martin Landau, told Rob that Carl had once confided in him: “Robbie wants to be an actor, and I just don’t know if he can do it.” Carl must have meant what he said because when Rob went for the lead role in his father’s semi-autobiographical 1967 film Enter Laughing, Carl cast someone else. “He turned me down. I was 19 at that time, it was a tough road.”It was only after seeing a 19-year-old Rob direct Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play No Exit that Carl realised his son was on the right path. “The next day he told me in the back yard, ‘I’m not worried about you.’ So clearly, before that, he was worried!”View image in fullscreenJust like his father, it seems unlikely Reiner will stop working anytime soon. The reason he’s in New Orleans today is because he’s about to start filming the Spinal Tap sequel. Forty years on from volumes that go up to 11, none-more-black albums and that minuscule Stonehenge, the new movie intends to capture the band as they reform to play a farewell concert at New Orleans’ Lakefront Arena – that is, if they can get over the fact that they are no longer on speaking terms.Reiner was an unknown entity as a director when the original came out – audiences didn’t always spot the satire at first and wondered why he’d made a full-length movie about a terrible band with no fans – but this time will be different, with Paul McCartney, Elton John and Garth Brooks among the knowing guest stars signed up to appear. Following up a cult classic is a risky business and Reiner admits that everyone is feeling the pressure.“It’s nerve-racking,” he says. “People would always come up to us and say, come on, you should do another one. We never wanted to do it, but we came up with an idea we think works. Hopefully, it’ll be funny. Because, boy, is it a high bar.”View image in fullscreenAs with the original, the dialogue will all be improvised – but surely he’s not going to throw Sir Paul into the lion’s den of improv?“Yes I am!” he beams. “I told him, just don’t worry about it, you just talk and, whatever happens, we go on for ever. I’m not going to use the whole thing, just whatever the thing is that works.”Tap’s influence is all over pop culture these days. Reiner recalls a fundraising party in which Elon Musk drove in with his first electric car, invited him to sit inside and turned the radio’s volume switch up to its maximum level – which was 11. “That was a good thing he did,” smiles Reiner. “He’s done some other things I’m not so thrilled about.”Despite the many years he’s spent working on other projects, Reiner has no problem sharing anecdotes about the films he made decades ago. Like how the unbearable tension of Misery was even worse on the actual set. “You have Jimmy Caan, who is a very physical guy – a baseball player, he rode in the rodeo – and he had to be in bed all the time! And there was Kathy Bates playing Annie Wilkes, a stage-trained actor who wanted more and more rehearsals, while Jimmy wanted to do no rehearsals! When we filmed the scene where he unlocks the door with the hairpin and moves with his wheelchair into the hallway … well, even though we had moved just a few feet, it was like kids being let out on recess.”He’s delighted by how many people love his movies, but he says he doesn’t take the praise or criticism too seriously. At a cocktail party once, the former supreme court justice Anthony Kennedy once came up to him and said: “All courtroom dramas are terrible, awful … apart from A Few Good Men … and [1992 Joe Pesci comedy] My Cousin Vinny!’” He laughs at this. “He says that then lumps it in with My Cousin Vinny, so it doesn’t matter what other people think!”View image in fullscreenReiner can’t pinpoint any reason why his films have stood the test of time. But he especially loves the reactions he gets to The Princess Bride, his revisionist fairytale from 1987. “People come up and say: ‘I saw it when I was six, and now I show it to my kid.’ That makes me feel good.”Like Spinal Tap, that film was another slow burner, but Reiner is hoping that God and Country will make a more immediate impact. “We need to reach as many people as we can before the election,” he says. But even if he can, does he really think evangelicals are likely to engage with it?“It’s not for the hardcore,” Reiner accepts. “But we’re hoping to reach other Christians who might have been drawn into this unwittingly. That’s why we talk to some very conservative Christian thinkers in the documentary [such as the preacher and theologian Russell D Moore], very devout people, who are asking: are these really the teachings of Jesus? A lot of them see Christian nationalism as a threat to Christianity.”All Reiner wants is for those watching to think of the none-more-Christian phrase – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you – and ask themselves if they’re truly living up to it? “Because, as my father used to say: follow that, and you don’t even need the Ten Commandments. That covers everything.” More

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      ‘There’s an art to not alarming people’: the duo who pranked Trump, Cruz and the NRA

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      Interview‘There’s an art to not alarming people’: the duo who pranked Trump, Cruz and the NRAMatthew Cantor The Good Liars – AKA Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler – have mined a rich seam by infiltrating rightwing events and satirizing them with a straight faceThey have told Donald Trump he’s boring, obtained Dr Ben Carson’s signature to authorize a weed prescription, and attempted an exorcism on Ted Cruz.Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, AKA the Good Liars, have been working together since the era of Occupy Wall Street. Interviewing rightwing activists and slipping undercover into political rallies, their brand of satire exists somewhere between The Daily Show’s correspondent segments and the character-driven comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen.Comedian infiltrates NRA event to mock Wayne LaPierre’s ‘thoughts and prayers’Read moreAt an event for Ted Cruz – a frequent target – Stiefler managed to get onstage next to the senator and ask the crowd: “What made everyone so weird and sad that they had to come out here?” During a moment of prayer with the then presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, Selvig asked God to “give the candidates the strength to know when to quit”. But you might know them best from a recent appearance at an NRA convention in Houston, days after the school shooting in Texas.Addressing attendees as well as the NRA’s executive vice-president himself, Selvig made an impassioned speech, condemning “the leftwing media” for “saying Wayne LaPierre isn’t doing enough to stop these mass shootings”.He reeled off a seemingly endless list of tragedies before reminding the crowd that “the NRA under Wayne LaPierre’s leadership has provided thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. And maybe these mass shootings would stop happening if we all thought a little bit more and we prayed a little bit more.”Many in the audience appeared to miss the satire. But when a clip of the speech emerged online, the rest of the world certainly didn’t. As of Monday, the video had received nearly 10m views on Twitter alone.It was hardly planned in advance. “We didn’t know that I was going to have that opportunity to be on a microphone with Wayne LaPierre until I walked into the room,” Selvig tells the Guardian. He spent the moments before his speech trying to craft remarks that “matched the tone” of the others there – apparently successfully, given the applause afterward.Selvig and Stiefler – born in the 80s, though they found themselves temporarily unable to speak when asked their exact ages – met through friends on the comedy scene in New York City. They became friends playing basketball together before conducting their first joint project, during Occupy Wall Street. Selvig and Stiefler posed as bankers, telling the media they represented the “Occupy Occupy Wall Street” movement and were proud to be part of the 1%. Speaking to protesters while wearing “thrift store suits”, they would lament their plight: “‘We’re gonna have to stop doing so much cocaine if we can’t afford it any more because you guys are out here,’” Stiefler recalls saying. “Kind of, like, over-the-top stuff that ended up being taken seriously.”They were surprised when actual bankers fell for the joke and joined them. “We sold merch, like to be funny – we thought we would sell zero of them. But we sold a bunch of, like, $300 cufflinks that said ‘1%’ on them, you know, playing this part,” Stiefler says. “We were trying to be found out and we couldn’t.” Finally, Rachel Maddow caught on.The time we asked Ted Cruz why he is so sad and weird. pic.twitter.com/1tbIrypaar— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) June 15, 2020
      “Ever since then, we’ve felt like there was comedy to be mined from real situations,” Stiefler says. “And it was almost like we back-doored our way into being kind of socially, politically aware, because if we’re gonna go to events, interact with real people, it’s much more satisfying if we’re able to stick it to the right people.”That led to a new project a few years later: a film in which the pair, playing the roles of undecided and not-so-bright voters, pranked the 2016 presidential candidates. “That was kind of the beginning of the way we’re doing things now,” Stiefler says.That film led to the Cruz exorcism attempt, as well as firing guns with Rick Santorum while in character as worshipful fans, calling him “Dad”, and a query to Marco Rubio about a girlfriend who had fallen for the candidate: “What can I do to win her back? You won her away from me.”The amount of preparation that goes into each encounter varies widely. For the film, much of the planning was an effort to find “the funniest interaction that hopefully has some social commentary woven into it”, Selvig says, but also fit with the fictional character’s motivations.But plenty of improvisation is involved. Selvig describes the moment when they stood at the front of a Trump rally, in suits and bright red Maga hats, and began loudly complaining that he was boring – derailing the speech before Trump instructed security to get rid of them.“We had kind of a plan going in for something to do,” Selvig says, but that changed when they arrived on the scene. “We didn’t realize that it was going to be so boring. He actually is very boring live, because he just repeats the same things you’ve heard over and over and over again.” It occurred to them that pointing that out would be “the most insulting thing” for Trump. “It would hurt his feelings the most. And that was important,” Selvig says.Both men have backgrounds in improvisation, particularly Stiefler, who was on several teams as part of New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade. Selvig has a degree in drama from Syracuse University. But theatrical work can only take you so far when your scene partners are America’s political leaders.“We’re not working necessarily with the people in the same way you do onstage at a UCB improv show. It’s just kind of a different beast,” Stiefler says.“Ted Cruz is a horrible improv,” Selvig adds.So what is it like performing with someone like that – how do Selvig and Stiefler maintain their remarkable composure?It can be frightening, Stiefler says, particularly given all the concerns leading up to the key moment – getting through campaign security, occupying spaces where they aren’t supposed to be. “So yeah, our hearts are kind of beating and everything,” he says.But “once you’ve started, it would be weirder to bail than it would be just to see it through. It would be stranger and more alarming to people, I think, if you give up halfway through,” he adds. “I’ve never found it hard to keep a straight face, because once you’re in, you’re in.”That certainly applied to Selvig’s NRA speech, which went on for two minutes without interruption. “I didn’t really have time to worry about it, because by the time I’d gotten the creative down, I was in front of the microphone speaking,” Selvig says.But there was a very different reason to be fearful: everyone in that room, as Stiefler puts it, was “decidedly armed”.“There’s definitely an art to not alarming people too much and not seeming threatening in any way. But [Jason] being able to get on the microphone like that, I think it was such a just a perfect way of getting a chance to say what 60% of the country would love to say to Wayne LaPierre,” Stiefler says. The speech took place at an event where NRA members were voicing their opinions on his leadership, so LaPierre “really had to sit there. Listen to it. Take it all in.”Last year, the two found themselves on the fringes of a particularly unsafe environment: they were near the Capitol on January 6, speaking to those in the area before the riot. “We were talking to people and it was like – it had a feeling like something bad was gonna happen,” Stiefler says. “And as bad as it was, I was kind of grateful that we were there to document some of it.” He recalled speaking to one man who gave a monologue about Trump’s greatness and how he would “die in his boots” for the country; others described “1776 2.0”.“It just gives you a window into what’s going on, how convinced people are of this,” Stiefler says. “Being there that day is something I will never, never forget.”They watched people break through a police line and saw people speaking in tongues. Their microphones made them a target and they were surrounded and threatened. “I didn’t sleep for a week afterwards,” Selvig says. “Cops were crying – military, these grown tough dudes are crying because they’d lost control and didn’t know if their friends were all being killed inside … nobody knew what was happening.”At a time like this, can comedy cut through the madness? Stiefler and Selvig see reason for at least a little hope.“We have fans that will reach out and say we have kept them caring at all about politics – they would have unplugged a long time ago if they didn’t have a way of interacting with it that wasn’t so depressing,” Stiefler says.At Trump rallies, younger supporters of the ex-president will approach them and say how much they love the videos. “That’s got to be a good thing, if these people are decidedly not identifying with the really out-there stuff that we’re making fun of,” Stiefler adds.“It’s not like we’re trying to make Democrats out of everybody. We just think these certain people, and these certain ideas, need to be called out.”TopicsComedyUS politicsNRAfeaturesReuse this content More

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      PJ O’Rourke obituary

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      PJ O’Rourke obituaryConservative American humorist, political satirist and writer who took aim at his own generation – the baby boomers The American humorist PJ O’Rourke, who has died aged 74 of lung cancer, was a writer of sharp wit that ranged from dry to lusciously over the top, but was always leavened by a measure of self deprecation that stopped it from being cruel or harsh. In the political satire that dominated his later writing, he became that rarest of things, a funny conservative.His political writing was based on his early change of tack from 1960s lefty to what he could call the libertarian right, libertarian being the escape hatch for those trapped within the Republican party. His changing stance mirrored the course of his career, from the satire of the National Lampoon and hipness of Rolling Stone to more earnest outlets such as the Atlantic Monthly and the rightwing Cato Institute.He had been instrumental in making the Atlantic Monthly Press a success; its editor Morgan Entrekin called him “one of the major voices of his generation”.The recurrent theme in his writing was his place in his generation – the baby boomers. “My generation spoiled everything for you,” he told younger readers. “It has always been the prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grownups. But my generation exhausted the earth’s resources of the weird … all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologise.”He was born in Toledo, Ohio, to Delfine (nee Loy), a housewife and later a school administrator, and Clifford O’Rourke, a car salesman. He went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio – “the one where you can’t major in windsurfing” – and took a master’s in English (1970) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he began writing for a local underground paper, Harry, and the Rip-Off Review of Western Culture, which got him a gig with the National Lampoon magazine in 1973.He made his mark quickly, working on the stage show Lemmings, which made stars of John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest, and co-writing with the Lampoon founder Doug Kenney The National Lampoon High School Yearbook, based on a piece by Michael O’Donoghue. There was a strong Irish-American wise-guys at the back of the class vibe at the Lampoon.Kenney also hailed from Ohio, but had attended a private school; the record of the fictional class of 1964 at a high school in Dacron (the name a cross between Ohio cities Dayton and Akron, but also a popular brand of cheap polyester cloth) was based squarely on O’Rourke’s days at Toledo’s DeVilbiss high. The yearbook itself was purportedly the property of one Larry Kroger, who would reappear in 1978 as the naive protagonist of the film National Lampoon’s Animal House.By the time Animal House became a hit, O’Rourke was the editor-in-chief of the Lampoon, charged with “the Squaresville task of making the magazine show a profit”. In the 2018 biopic of Kenney, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, O’Rourke is portrayed in just that light – but his empathy with squares was crucial to the yearbook’s success.Now he found himself out of place in a “clubby and snitty” atmosphere which remained as the creative core of the Lampoon moved on to Hollywood and Saturday Night Live. He turned the magazine, according to one critic, into “comedy you can jack off to”.In 1981 he went freelance, writing for the top-payers such as Vanity Fair and Playboy. His key Lampoon essay “How To Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”, was reprinted in his first book, Republican Party Reptile (1987), a homage to Hunter Thompson, the chief exponent of gonzo journalism, that saw him appointed “foreign desk chief” at Rolling Stone, the ultimate hip boomer journal.His writing moved from social satire to politics and he reported from war zones, where his knack for satirising the absurd found its true metier. His 1988 collection, Holidays in Hell, is perhaps the best of his 20 books. He became a celebrity, without slowing down in the least, but as I can attest after surviving a London evening with him and my then ABC television colleague Charles Glass, O’Rourke was one of those rare people who was nicer in private, going beyond his public affability, which often surprised those expecting combative wit.In 1991 O’Rourke interviewed Bill Clinton, along with his Rolling Stone colleagues Thompson and William Greider, and its publisher, Jann Wenner. He quickly slid Clinton into identity politics via the Lampoon yearbook template. Clinton’s favourite Beatle was Paul McCartney: Clinton was the “band geek” who paid attention in class.For a short time O’Rourke held down the right side of Point/Counterpoint on CBS’s flagship news show 60 Minutes, opposite the equally funny and acerbic Molly Ivins, but they were too brilliant a mix to last on network TV. As he once wrote, “no humorist is under any obligation to provide answers”.That voice could lose its affability when writing for the Cato Institute, but the new millennium presented new problems, which his work for the Atlantic laid out clearly. A 2004 essay on listening to the radio host Rush Limbaugh shouting to his echo chamber of “ditto heads” led him to search for a leftwing equivalent, but when he could not find one he wound up blaming the entire media landscape. He complained in another essay you could not tell the “liberals who once led Vietnam protests in clown pants from the car ads”, ironically putting his young self and his father into the same boat.His libertarian conservatism reached its apotheosis with Donald Trump’s taking over the Republican party, reflected in his 2016 book of election coverage How the Hell Did This Happen? He endorsed Hillary Clinton, because “she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters”. Although he claimed in 1992 he had “given up” the 60s, Trump was exactly the sort of spoiled preppy boomer O’Rourke could despise. But he might have looked back to his childhood, and Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo. It was Pogo who said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”In 1990 O’Rourke married Amy Lumet, daughter of the film director Sidney and granddaughter of the entertainer Lena Horne.They divorced three years later, and in 1995 he married Tina Mallon. She and their children, Olivia, Clifford and Elizabeth, survive him.TopicsMediaUS politicsComedyMagazinesUS televisionobituariesReuse this content More

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      Saturday Night Live: Regé-Jean Page hosts, cast use Cruz news for boos

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      We open on a Las Vegas talk show, Oops, You Did it Again. Hosted by Britney Spears (Chloe Fineman), who we all know from her “upbeat Instagram videos and the word ‘conservatorship’”, the show is a forum for public apologies.After a much-deserved potshot at Justin Timberlake, Spears welcomes her first guest: Ted Cruz (Aidy Bryant). Sporting cornrows and drinking a piña colada, the Texas senator, who this week got caught vacationing in Cancún amid his state’s energy crisis – and who blamed the whole thing on his young daughters – admits “I’m in a little bit of hot water, which is something I’m told people in Texas don’t have.”Next, Spears welcomes New York governor Andrew Cuomo (Pete Davidson), begrudgingly apologizing for “the nursing home stuff”. It pains him to eat crow, and he reaches breaking point after learning that “bird bitch” Mayor Bill DeBlasio thinks he should be investigated. Still, at least Cuomo’s not as pathetic as Cruz, whose sympathy he harshly rebuffs: “Do not. Associate yourself. With Me. I am a man. You are a clown. If you mess with me, I will send you to a clown hospital. And when you die, I will not count your body.”Last up is Mandalorian actor Gina Carano (Cecily Strong), let go from the Disney show for, among other things, comparing criticism of conservatives to Nazi persecution. She huffs and puffs about cancel culture and asks why Disney has the right to take the moral high ground: “Have you heard Brer Rabbit’s accent on the Splash Mountain ride?” This is a fair point, but having it come from Carano feels way off. Regardless, even she wants nothing to do with Cruz, telling him, “Do not. Associate yourself. With me.”The show gets points for going with an original setup for the cold open, as well as its mercilessness towards Cruz. That said, the cast constantly breaking hampers things. Nothing is that funny.Our host is Bridgerton actor Regé-Jean Page. After a quick Ray Jay Johnson reference that I assume went over his fans’ heads, he fends off the female cast. They’re all obsessed with the sexual dynamo he plays on the hit Netflix costume drama, although Aidy Bryant assures him, “We definitely have other sketch ideas where you aren’t just being an extremely hot sex man.” SNL has shown a tendency to over-rely on hosts’ hotness – see the recent Jason Momoa and Jennifer Lopez episodes, both dire.On Actor’s Spotlight, two black British actors – Kingsley Ben-Adir (Page) and Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Redd) – join Ice Cube (Kenan Thompson) to discuss their new movies. Cube tries to get in on the critical love by pretending he’s British too, claiming, “Me name’s not Ice Cube in Britain, it’s Coldy Squares.” No one buys it until Hugh Grant (Alex Moffat) shows up and recognizes him from the old neighborhood.After a short rap from Ego Nwodim, Davidson and musical guest Bad Bunny about going crazy during quarantine, a barroom game of pool is interrupted when a player puts on Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License. The dudes all make fun of the song, but eventually reveal they’re huge fans. In-depth discussions of the convoluted backstory and reminiscences of their own heartbreak lead to the male cast joining for “the bridge of our lives”.Next, Page interviews for a job at an ad company that works on spec, creating slogans for brands that didn’t ask. Disastrous examples include “Charmin – Use after you poop!”, “Legos – Bet you can’t eat just one and!” and “Netflix – We have porn now!”. Funny as the ads are, and good as the interaction between Page and Beck Bennett’s aloof boss is, the funniest bit is a recurring gag in which Bowen Yang’s harried assistant hands the two strange notes which read “We’re losing millions”, “They have your daughter”, “Your mom is topless in the lobby” and, simply, “Hi”. A bit overstuffed, this zany pre-filmed segment is still one of the best of the season.Bad Bunny takes the stage alongside Rosalía for a steamy duet on La Noche de Anoche. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost kicks things off by hammering Cruz, noting “if you hate Ted Cruz, this is a pretty fun week … and if you like Ted Cruz, well, you’re probably Ted Cruz.” Michael Che notes that the winter storm brought “the most snow seen in Texas since Michael Irvine’s Super Bowl party”.Jost welcomes “relationship expert” Davidson to discuss the “first and hopefully last” Valentine’s Day of the pandemic. Davidson recounts spending the holiday watching the Britney Spears doc with his mom, which convinced him to finally move out and get his own place.“My mom is a lot like this show,” he explains. “No matter what I do, I’m never asked to leave.”After taking a few more digs at Cruz and Cuomo (as well as making a joke about Israel only vaccinating its Jewish populace that’s sure to generate backlash), Che welcomes Jessie Rauch (Heidi Gardner), a community activist who wants to discuss food insecurity. She doesn’t get the chance, as Che can’t get over the fact she’s dressed like Freddy Krueger. I’m not sure what the point or punchline of this was, but Gardner’s silly charm keeps it from totally tanking.A History Channel show looks at sea shanties. A whaling crew sings one, quickly revealing no one knows what they’re doing and they’re all doomed: “Yoho, we’ll never go home/ We’re stuck out here and we’re all alone!” The funniest bit is a brief aside wherein the crew describe to a new sailor their various “sea wives” – a whale’s blowhole, a blanket stuffed into a barrel, two jellyfish tied together, and their hands.A get together between new neighboring families, one white, the other black, sees them engage in a grace-off, trying to one-up each other through gospel. You keep waiting for things to take a dark or awkward turn but everything stays surprisingly sweet. Kudos to Bennett, who shows off some seriously impressive dancing.On the set of Bridgerton, Page and a costar are set to film a sex scene but the intimacy coordinator is out sick. Her replacements are two dirtbags (Davidson and Mikey Day) who have no idea what they’re doing or even what the show is about – they seem to think it involves incest. The set up promises something edgy or risqué, but unfortunately it just meanders.Bad Bunny returns and performs Te Deseo Lo Mejor. Wrestling fans will get a kick out of him proudly sporting the WWE 24/7 Championship belt, which he recently won. I imagine non-wrestling fans will just be confused.The last sketch of the night is a music video set in a grocery store, in which a dopey trio of ironic white rappers keeps getting interrupted and shamed for not wearing masks. It ends with them tasered and tackled by the manager.There was a noticeable patchwork quality to most of the sketches tonight, but that wasn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it led to a lot of unexpectedly funny moments. It also made excellent use of Page’s musical abilities and Bad Bunny’s decent comic chops, the end result a lively, enjoyable episode. More

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      John Oliver on Trump's refusal to concede: 'Absolutely unforgivable'

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      John Oliver tore into Donald Trump’s “pathetic, dangerous” refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory on Last Week Tonight, after two weeks of the president’s attempts to delegitimize the results of the election with baseless claims of voter fraud, backed by most congressional Republicans. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, for example, said Trump is “100% within his rights” to challenge the election result, and chastised Democrats on the Senate floor for “any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election”.
      “First, no one expected Trump to immediately, cheerfully accept the results,” Oliver countered. “He’s incapable of cheerfully accepting anything apart from blowjobs, Nazi endorsements and the opportunity to scream inside a stranger’s truck,” to harken back to a photo-op from two years or what feels like two decades ago.

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      Furthermore, Democrats in Washington never refused to accept the election results in 2016: Hillary Clinton formally conceded the morning after election day, and Obama hosted Trump in the White House the day after that. “And yet Republicans are trying to defend their support for Trump’s indefensible behavior,” Oliver continued. One senior White House official asked the Washington Post: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” which Oliver called “a question that never ends well, whether the ones asking it are overworked parents who need a break or the Weimar Republic”.
      The Trump campaign and its television surrogates on Fox News have lobbed numerous unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud before, during and after the election, and “if you’re a casual viewer of rightwing media, you might think, ‘Well, there must be something here, they wouldn’t be going to all this trouble over nothing’”, Oliver said. “But the thing is, they are. This really is nothing.”
      Oliver summarily disproved Trump voter fraud claims from Pennsylvania to Georgia to Michigan – “I could spend the rest of this show debunking stories,” he said. “The problem is, it’s endless” and often nonsensical. “And who knows why Republicans are entertaining this – maybe it’s the fact that Georgia has two Senate runoffs coming up and they want to keep Trump happy so he’ll help rally voters for him there,” Oliver added. “Maybe they’re currying favor with him because they’re worried he’ll be a power broker going forward, I don’t know. What I do know is that the answer to the question ‘what is the downside of humoring him?’ is a lot.”
      The Trump administration’s refusal to acknowledge the election’s outcome prevents Biden from receiving high-level intelligence reports or accessing funds for his transition team. More pressingly, it blocks Trump officials from sharing critical details of a distribution plan for a Covid vaccine with Biden’s team. As cases surge to new records across the country heading into the holiday season, “you really want the new team handling the pandemic to be able to talk to the old team,” said Oliver, “even if, as I suspect, the old team’s plan was just a single white board in Jared’s office with nothing on it other than ‘discover cure?’ circled five times and then a drawing of Donald Trump saying: ‘Good job, new son.’”
      Many of Trump’s election fraud claims are laughable or ridiculous, Oliver continued, but “the fact is, a lot of people believe stuff like that. And when you continually insist that the election was stolen in big cities and suggest that remedying this calls for the ‘biggest fight since the civil war’,” to quote a video retweeted by Trump of the actor Jon Voight comparing contesting Biden to battling Satan, “things start to get deadly serious.” Earlier this month, two armed men were arrested outside the Philadelphia convention center, where city officials were counting ballots. One of the city’s commissioners, a Republican, told CBS news that the vote-counting center had received threatening phone calls “reminding us that ‘this is what the second amendment is for’”.
      It’s clear, Oliver said in response to the situation in Philadelphia, that “Trump is playing a dangerous game here, because there’s a huge difference between ‘not my president’ and ‘not the president’. And to be clear, people who are that angry are not riling themselves up in a vacuum. They’ve been fed a steady diet of misinformation, bullshit fraud claims, and a victim narrative from outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, OANN and, most importantly, Trump himself.”
      Trump’s continued propagation of election conspiracy theories via Twitter since the election are an “appropriate coda to a presidency that has destroyed so many lives”, said Oliver. “So many of us have lost loved ones, either because you can no longer square your love for them with their love for him, or because they fell down a mind-melting rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that he happily perpetuated, or because he let a deadly virus run wild, and it fucking killed them.
      “And now, as a parting gift to the country,” he concluded, “Trump is somehow managing to divide us even further while also hobbling his successor at the worst possible time, which is absolutely unforgivable.” More

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      Can late-night comedy recover from the Trump presidency?

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      As the results trickled in on election night 2016, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show on CBS, processed Donald Trump’s victory live, before a shocked audience. He lamented America’s partisan divide (“how did our politics get so poisonous?”), professed belief in the utility of comedy (“in the face of something that might strike you as horrible, I think laughter is the best medicine. You cannot laugh and be afraid at the same time”) and offhandedly prefigured the identity crisis to come for late-night television: “I’m not sure it’s a comedy show any more.”
      Colbert performed the role of late-night host nimbly, even if the genre of an election night comedy hour was poorly suited for the victory of a candidacy that had been viewed by many as a joke. Trump, as the TV critic Emily Nussbaum argued in January 2017, had long performed, and audience-tested in rallies, the role of a boozy, heckling, aggrieved standup comic, one who shrugged off countless taboos as “sarcastic” jokes, one with an endless appetite for attention.
      Nussbaum’s essay, published in the first week of Trump’s presidency, evinced the trap facing liberal political comedians: “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” How do you skewer a performer who never made any attempt at sincerity? How could network and cable comedy, overwhelmingly delivered by straight white men, effectively lampoon a self-evidently ridiculous social media troll whose only currency was attention? Trump may have seemed at the outset like a boon to jokesters, but his presidency – the flat denials, the destabilizing cascade of crises and a fractured, contemptuous media landscape – has killed political comedy.
      Where does late-night go from here? Regardless of whether or not Trump is re-elected, his presidency has altered the genre in form and function. For four years, political comedy, and in particular late-night television, has lurched through a cyclical Trump attention loop: hosts mock the president, Trump continues with the next galling lie or lashes out on Twitter (or both), hosts mock Trump again, attention paid and courted and repaid. In the 2010s, as the lines in American cultural commentary blurred – political propaganda, social life and memes blended in a gorging timeline of content – Trump jokes became the default late-night currency. Even Jimmy Fallon, the affable Saturday Night Live (SNL) alum who infamously tousled Trump’s hair in 2015, was forced by a ratings war into more political monologues.
      In the Trump era, the genre has morphed to shoulder two burdens: to metabolize liberal outrage through short-circuited Trump jabs (Seth Meyers’ Closer Look segments, SNL’s too-numerous cold opens, whose main insight seems to be the sight of various celebrities game for impersonation); and to process the torrent of headlines in our confounding, infuriating, oversaturated reality.

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      The latter is not an insignificant function, given the time and sanity-erasing blankness of constant disruption and, say, a global pandemic. During the nationwide protests against anti-black police brutality this summer, late-night shows helped keep people tethered to, rather than escape from, the feverish timeline of deeply unfunny police crackdowns and ongoing pandemic surges. Many people got the gist of impeachment, the Mueller report, the Russia investigation, Trump corruption and justice department manipulations through late-night comedy shows. (The leading program, Colbert’s Late Show, averaged 3.45m viewers in 2019-2020; Saturday Night Live drew 8.24m viewers for its 46th season premiere last month, its highest audience since 2016.)
      There’s certainly a democratic function to that processing; when everything is politicized and the news landscape is calcified either in bad faith propaganda (Fox News) or norms of impartial politeness (the Sunday talkshows), late-night “comedy” – a pastiche of recaps, clips and jokes delivered by a host allowed to call bullshit – becomes a manageable way to keep up with things. But that doesn’t mean it was necessarily funny or sustainable or, to quote Colbert on election night, really a comedy show any more. Kimmel and Fallon seem to view jokes as a formality before the more entertaining work of interviewing celebrities; Late Night’s Seth Meyers has almost dispensed with jokes entirely in his outrage-laden, indignant Closer Look warnings on America’s descent into authoritarianism.

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      Late-night political comedy, following the model of The Daily Show, built a common language through the George W Bush and Barack Obama years: point out bad faith and dishonesty through videos stitched with hard news reports, then voice collective outrage at the con. But the past four years have undermined the belief that comedy could serve as an effective weapon against an administration whose reality show is outdone by its horrifying, very real “accomplishments”. The late-night shows once seemed to get under Trump’s skin, but to what effect? He might call the hosts “very weak and untalented” on Twitter, or continue his longstanding feud with SNL (and especially his impersonator, Alec Baldwin, although his attention for late-night shows appears to have waned this year). But in a polarized, post-hypocrisy world, jokes don’t so much thwart the hypocrite as draw viewers back into the reactive loop.
      The host perhaps most successful at navigating the Trump years, and the most critically acclaimed, is John Oliver, whose unsparing, morally clear, melodically ranting explainers on HBO’s Last Week Tonight focus on the rot around or tangential to Trump, rather than the man himself. Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee similarly works in allusive jokes around issues-driven monologues, as one of the few female hosts and a rare success in the 2010s boom and bust of liberal news comedy shows which evince the struggle to break fresh ground in the Trump era. The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, The Opposition With Jordan Klepper, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, The Jim Jefferies Show and The Break With Michelle Wolf all premiered after January 2015, and have all since been cancelled.
      Sharp-toothed political comedy, meanwhile, has shifted to the masses on social media, and in particular TikTok. Political accounts run by Zoomers, which overlay pop music on bespoke factchecking, dances, healthcare advocacy and nihilistic memes, have become “cable news for young people”. Sarah Cooper’s lip-syncing Trump impressions blew up on TikTok and Twitter, leading to a guest-host gig on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. But her Netflix comedy special, Everything’s Fine, slams into the wall of Trump-centric satire and exemplifies the dilemma of traditional comedic forms; absent the fundamental insight of her impressions – that nothing satirizes Trump more than his own words – comedy rooted in the destabilizing chaos of the current moment sprouts starchy, disposable bits, jokes that strain when they should zing.
      What, then, can late-night comedy do? The shows do, after all, retain huge audiences, with institutional legitimacy and social media platforms that reach millions. Their guest slots can and have elevated diverse and “radical” perspectives, such as prison abolition advocates and Black Lives Matter activists. In 2020, late-night TV has gained the most cultural cachet when it embraces not redundant Trump jokes but the flexibility of the format – performing the duties television journalists refuse to do, for example, such as Colbert’s grilling the motives of the former Trump adviser John Bolton.

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      Ironically, it’s perhaps most relevant when it’s serious, self-aware, stripped down. In June, Trevor Noah released a quarantine-filmed video in reaction to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, in which he spoke plainly to white audiences as a person of color, a child of apartheid South Africa who understood state violence. “That unease that you felt watching that Target being looted, try to imagine how it must feel for black Americans when they watch themselves being looted every single day,” he said. “Because that’s fundamentally what’s happening in America: police in America are looting black bodies.”
      Noah’s video was shared widely on social media and cited by activist Kimberly Jones in Minneapolis, whose words were then incorporated in an episode of Last Week Tonight. More recently, Colbert has straight-up implored people to vote out the president; “We have two weeks to decide what kind of country this is gonna be,” he said last week, in reaction to news that the administration still had not reunited 545 children, separated from their families at the border, with their parents.
      There’s no laughter in such statements, no finding humor as an antidote. Earnestness – anathema to internet humor – is an awkward spot for late-night comedy to find itself in. But it’s cutting through bullshit, the leg work of sorting context and promoting inquiry, where late-night comedy can still find wiggle room, fresh territory with or without Trump. It’s not so much telling jokes as telling it straight – humor as a prerequisite but not the punch. More

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      Borat v Trump: can entertainment really affect an election?

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      Even with the United States on red alert for pandemic containment, a pernicious phrase has been creeping into the public lexicon at an unprecedented rate of spread. We’ve been beset by a plague known as “the film we need right now”, a noxious concept used to justify and amplify the profiles of nearly a dozen releases over the past year.The run-up to the presidential election has brought about an explosion of topical projects announcing themselves as a noble bulwark against the encroaching threat of another Trump term. And with them, the age-old debate over what any of this actually accomplishes has been reignited. Every time a film introduces itself as the one we need right now, it must first answer the question of whether a film is what we really need. As of late, the arguments have not been especially compelling.A variety of approaches to critique and cinematic styles have been bound together by their shared objective of pushback against the currents of Trumpism, most prominent among them the new documentary Totally Under Control. Alex Gibney’s documentary about the current administration’s grossly incompetent coronavirus response touts itself as filmed in secret, rushed to press in time for election day with the urgency of a breaking news story. Alexandra Pelosi (yes, they’re related) and Showtime have also positioned her new documentary American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself in close proximity to the first Tuesday in November, its broad portraiture of a nation in crisis speaking directly to its moment. This week, Brittany Huckabee (no, they’re not related) brings a more granular analysis to the electoral process in her non-fiction film How to Fix a Primary. In each case, time appears to be of the essence.While perhaps less rigorous in terms of reportage, the Borat sequel Subsequent Moviefilm has arrived with a similar sense of gravity, with less than two weeks on the clock before the vote. And though the small-screen series The Comey Rule gave itself a bit more lead time, the Trump critiques nonetheless gesture to the coming reckoning that may or may not result in four more years of his White House. Baldest in its intentions would be the recent reunion of executive-branch drama The West Wing, the promo copy explicitly using the phrase “a call to action” to describe the program’s star-spangled defense of the democratic process. Yet there’s an air of futility to this campaign behind the campaign.On matters like this, I often refer back to the troubling anecdote in which Donald Trump watches the 1988 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Bloodsport on a plane, fast-forwarding through all dialogue so he can get to the violence and destruction. Suffice it to say that many subscribers to the Trumpist worldview are not the most receptive to the swaying powers of art. And that’s when they engage with it in the first place, the vast majority being unlikely to give the time of day to an entertainment so openly trumpeting its liberal bona fides. Those films that make an active effort to reach across the aisle and appeal to a theoretical rightwing viewership often undermine the point they’re making. The Comey Rule often strains to paint Republican higher-ups as helpless objectors against Trump’s bulldozing influence, where complicity didn’t have to be dragged out of anyone. For this seeming reluctance to alienate the unconverted, it’s a weaker work. More