I remember Rich Little, yes I do. From way, way back. He used to impersonate Nixon, annoying my father. He could make his jowls wobble when he did it, too. When I was a little girl, the man was cutting-edge. And this is why the comments on the White House Press Corps Dinner fascinate me.
As all the world knows, last years' dinner was a debacle because Stephen Colbert was very, very rude to the entire assembled press and to the President, offending everyone. So this year, nobody was taking any chances, I guess. Hey---as my dad used to say---you pays your money and you takes your choice. Which kind of sums up what happened here: a completely different kind of debacle.
Here's a pre-dinner note by Jim Rutenberg.
[quote begins from Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times, No Offense Intended With This Year’s Choice of Entertainer, but Still an Outcry.
In hiring an impersonator practiced in an old-school approach to comedy, meant to entertain but not offend, the White House Correspondents’ Association has, however, provoked left-leaning political activists, who see his assignment as a retreat from last year’s dinner. Then, the television satirist Stephen Colbert delivered a stinging roast of President Bush and, to a lesser extent, the White House press corps.
Mr. Little has said he would deliver no such performance this year. And his selection has become something of a symbol in the liberal blogosphere for what its members consider the proclivity of Washington reporters to give Mr. Bush and his administration a pass.
“It represents that the White House press corps is more interested in playing friendly and cozying up to the Bush administration than it is in providing the sort of oversight that a free press should provide in a democracy,” said Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the Daily Kos. “They shouldn’t be yukking it up together as if they’re pals and friends, and that’s why we’ve had so much terrible coverage.”
[quote ends; links in original
Here's a post-dinner assessment by David Carr.
[ quote begins from Carr, New York Times, Carson-Era Humor, Post-Colbert]
Last year, Mr. Colbert looked across the sea of tuxedos and referred to the members of the press as “clowns.”
Because he failed to acknowledge both the propriety and the primacy of the establishment press, Mr. Colbert bombed inside the room, drawing disapproving looks from all quarters and little initial coverage....
This year, the correspondents’ association decided to regain custody of the event, sending out the message that it values Washington as it used to be, a maypole for policy and power, even as the next generation of consumers gathers more news and information from outside the mainstream media...
Mr. Little, a one-man time machine, obliged by dialing the room back decades to a time when Uncle Walter told us that’s the way it is, Johnny Carson tucked us all in and a bit about Richard Nixon singing “My Way” was considered naughty fun. A painful piano ditty that would not pass muster in the Catskills made fun, not of the president, but of something we can all get behind: Osama bin Laden’s turban. “And you thought Colbert was bad,” Mr. Little said after one particularly acute miss.....
Christopher Hitchens, the writer and Vanity Fair columnist, walked out of the dinner at about the time Mr. Little got around to his Ronald Reagan impression.
“The event was disgraceful, so lame and mediocre that it is beyond parody,” he said later. “It is impossible to decide which is more offensive: the president fawning over the press or the press fawning over the president. It expresses everything that the public means when they talk about inside-the-Beltway and access journalism.”
[quote ends; links in original]
Arianna Huffington didn't enjoy the trip in Little's "way back machine" either. Like Hitchens, she left early.
[quote begins from The Huffington Post by Arianna Huffington, Frayed Nerves, Excruciating Punchlines, and Sanjaya: My Night at the White House Correspondents' Dinner ]
Little...turned out to be irritatingly bad rather than soothingly bland as intended.
Look, I have nothing against Rich Little. He's a perfectly fine entertainer, if your idea of entertainment is impersonations of Dwight Eisenhower and Telly Savalas (is there anyone still alive who would know the difference between a good Eisenhower impersonation and a bad one?) or jokes about hemorrhoids.
And, full disclosure, I didn't watch his entire performance. It was so painful, at a certain point I ducked out. But from what I saw, Little delivered exactly what the White House Correspondents' Association wanted (give or take a groaner or ten). People remember Colbert's performance last year for his skewering of the president but, in fact, he also brilliantly and brutally skewered the media for their complicity in the outrages of the last six years....
"Here's how it works," he reminded the stunned crowd, "the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know: fiction!"
[quote ends]
Here's David Weigel from Wonkette, Breaking: Rich Little Not Funny 23 Years Ago]. He provides a sample plus a link to Rich Little's Official Homepage. "At least 66 percent of the people he mimicks are dead. At least 40
percent of them sound mysteriously like Johnny Carson talking out the
side of his mouth." To be fair, I thought he was funny when I was a little girl. I sort of had a crush on him. He was the first impressionist I'd ever seen and I was, what, 10? 13? How my little brother and I laughed!
If you want to see Rich Little's performance, here it be. I couldn't get through it, but if you want to see what you missed by being too young to remember Carson (and I'm too young to have watched Carson), here's your chance.
And maybe---is it possible?---it's so embarrassingly bad that it works its way back to being kind of awesome? As in "comedy for people who take themselves too damn seriously"?
Comments