The State of the George W. Bush Joke

[Fleshdancer]

This is a very interesting article about how W jokes are increasingly political now. It's a comedy/politics article so I wasn't sure if the lounge was the best place or general election 2004. Forgive me mods if I posted this in the wrong place.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/arts/television/X22ZENG.html


At the fund-raiser, Mr. Ferrell's Bush, who was wearing a flight suit, boasted of his plan to replace logged ancient redwoods with "substitute trees" made out of red-painted plywood. He then told the crowd: "Will I be able to do everything you people want? No. Frankly a lot of endangered species are going to be extincted. But this is part of evolution and natural selection. Which, by the way, I don't believe in."

Adam McKay, a former "Saturday Night Live" head writer who wrote the scripts for Mr. Ferrell's defense council performance and Internet ads, says: "When we first started doing Bush on `Saturday Night Live,' the `Bush is dumb' joke was too good. But now, the more we've gotten to see how terrible his record is on things like the environment and how he struts and sneers and how cocky he can be, the more we've been able to refine the impersonation."

...But by the time the Iraq war started, on shows like "Saturday Night Live" and "The Daily Show," something unusual happened: the jokes got serious. While these shows now treat John Kerry as they once treated Mr. Bush, mocking the Democratic nominee for harmless personal characteristics like his long face and stentorian voice, their jokes about Mr. Bush are unapologetically political, directly criticizing the administration and its actions. Last December on "Saturday Night Live," the "Weekend Update" host Tina Fey ridiculed the Bush administration's distribution of lucrative Iraq rebuilding contracts. "We should reward the brave American businessmen and businesswomen who fought so hard to free Iraq from evil," she said. "Let us not forget the brave Halliburton executives that stormed Baghdad . . . or the fearless Nextel c.f.o. who threw himself on a grenade."

Jon Stewart, the host of "The Daily Show," has repeatedly insisted that he's nonpartisan ("I'm a Whig," he recently told Fox News). But lately his Bush jokes have started to seem like a sustained argument with the president, as when Mr. Bush recently made a speech in which he declared, eight times, that as a result of the war in Iraq "America is safer." Speaking directly to a videotaped image of the president, Mr. Stewart demanded: "What criteria are you using to prove this? What evidence is there other than you saying it?" But thanks to a montage, the president only repeated the claim. "So that's what it comes down to," Mr. Stewart intoned. "The Bush administration's strategy to fight terrorism is repetition."