I recently watched Bill O’Reilly as a guest on the The Colbert Report. So I had to go online to see Colbert on the O’Reilly Factor.
Then I watched another clip on YouTube called “Colbert on O’Reilly Pt 2”. Analyst Bernard Golderg is way too funny! You know it’s going to be good when he begins with:
You always run the risk when, when you try to seriously analyze comedy, because you, you run the risk of coming off as a dufus. So you, So here I go taking that…that risk
Such a disclaimer lets us know two important things:
1. What will follow will definitely make him come off as a dufus
2. The guy is wildly uncomfortable with what he is about to say
Of course one can analyze comedy. People do it all the time — quite successfully. It’s the thinking person’s job to analyze (or am I just showing that I am an English teacher?). If you are coming off as a dufus, you should probably rethink your analysis. True, EB White said: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it,” but we’re not talking about dissecting a joke here.
He goes on to talk about how Jack Benny, Lucy Ball, and Jackie Gleason poked fun at themselves — a golden age of comedy, completely ignoring the fact that people used to make up “comedic” racist caricatures — think Andy Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” He then compares these “wholesome comedians” (of course linking them to comedy of yesteryear) to the “wiseguys” of today. If you’re calling Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert a “wiseguy” you’re just asking for it. He says they are seen as cutting edge and that:
The media, the old media especially, which is not hip at all, thinks that some of the hipness is going to rub off on them if they build these guys up and put them on the cover of their magazines and stuff like that.
This is all from a guy who wrote a book called 110 People who are screwing up America. I am at first shocked that a news network would have this nitwit on, but then I have to consider the source.
The Connecticutian 