The Jester vs the King (Al Franken vs Donald Trump)

Al Franken is the Jester. He had a political career but it came to a crashing halt. “Off with his head,” says the angry King when the Jester’s jokes fall flat. Franken’s head came off due to a photo. A picture is worth 1,000 words, after all.

Leeann Tweeden held a photo of Franken making believe he was grabbing her breasts while she slept in a Kevlar vest and wearing a helmet. Not really a sexy photo. Franken looks directly at the camera lens, hamming it up like a true jester. The two participated together in a skit as part of a 2006 USO gig—a worthy effort for which Franken has paid dearly.

Tweeden held on to the photo for 11 years. It serves as supporting material for her claims against Franken. She maintains Al Franken attempted to kiss her in skit rehearsals and that she soundly rejected those advances. Franken remembers it a different way.

A few weeks elapsed, more Franken stories emerged revealing his penchant for grabbing women’s asses during photo shoots. What is it with Franken and photos? The camera seems to bring out the worst in the guy. This is truly nerdy behavior. And Franken himself provided a map to recognizing his nerdiness.

Remember Stuart Smalley, the fey character invented by Franken in 1991 for Saturday Night Live (SNL)? Smalley’s most famous affirmation… “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it, people like me”… reveals deep feelings of inadequacy. Comedy is all about truth. Franken revealed his own deep personal insecurities.

Maybe Al Franken really is Stuart Smalley. Smalley… the name itself implies a lack of potency. Smallness is exactly the wrong personality to survive a tidal wave of criticism. His own Democratic party created a tipping point. Must have hurt Franken deeply when fellow Democratic senators—particularly Kirsten Gillibrand of New York—called for his resignation. Al Franken, the duly elected Senator from Minnesota, resigned soon after.

Meanwhile, King Donald Trump handled a Gillibrand attack a very different way. Gillibrand suggested Trump should resign the presidency for sexual harassment stories surrounding him for years. King Donald followed his ethos, when you get hit, hit back harder at your opponent and show no mercy.

Trump tweeted:

“Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Charles E. Schumer and someone who would come to my office 'begging' for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump,” the president wrote. “Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!”

Trump’s tweet questions Gillibrand’s fitness for office-- calling her a lightweight. Trump depicts Gillibrand soliciting money from Trump for her political campaigns. He demeans her further suggesting she “would do anything” for the money.

Trump implies Gillibrand would have considered offering sexual favors in exchange for money. He goes right to sexuality but turns the tables with Gillibrand as a possible exploiter and trafficker in sexual favors. Ah, the genius of the Tweeter in Chief. His great skills are:

1)  branding the Trump name

2)   branding others with insulting nicknames

3)   seeking out conflict

Whereas most of us seek peace in our relationships, Trump relishes conflict. Trump, the contrarian and TV producer, knows that every story needs conflict. The classic Hollywood story pits two adversaries against each other. The arrow of rising conflict between adversaries always points upward.

Trump gets his enemies back on their heels. He keeps himself prominent in the story—never backs off and never acknowledges defeat.

Compare Trump’s aggression to Al Franken’s passivity in response to the accusations level against him. Franken seems guilty of being a nerd. Not just a nerd… but a nerd extraordinaire. He lacked game when it came to women. Franken’s victims did not offer horror stories about him. His sins seemed more like the antics of a middle schooler kid ill-equipped to handle a conversation with a girl or woman.

The Jester was just not suited to do battle. Jester’s prefer peace, striving to tell the truth about a situation as a way to defuse the discomfort.

As Marshall McLuhan said many times, humor is about societal grievance. The comedian finds the areas where society is most vulnerable, like race relations, and scratches that itch. Comedians are essentially peace-makers. Al Franken’s peaceful path, the Stuart Smalley jokes and ironic humor, did not work for keeping his job.

The Jester left with his head cut-off. The angry King still stands waving his sword at any rival. Kirsten Gillibrand had the temerity to challenge the king. He came back hard and viciously. Trump brings everything back to Trump—and keeps the cosmos in order with himself as the Sun, the center of gravitational force.

Stephen Colbert: healing a pained nation

The talk show host serves the role of an electronic shaman, a healer of society’s wounds, using a gentle nature and the toolkit of comedy, full of pun, metaphor and sleight-of-hand wordplay. He (almost always a male) brings up the painful issues while adding salve to these raw areas. He makes sense of sensitive subjects not yet suitable for polite discussion and not fully understood or absorbed.

The starting point for my understanding of the talk show host came from a single source: 

1) a single passage by Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae

Camille Paglia speaks of “a category of androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother. He can be found in sculptures of the river gods, in Romantic poetry ((Wordsworth and Keats) and in modern popular culture (television talk show hosts).”

Paglia’s discussion moves to the transsexual qualities of the Delphic oracle and the mixture of male and female voices in the prophesying of the Oracle of Delphi. The medium assumes multiple personalities much like the “ventriloquism Frazer ascribes to entranced shamans.” (Sexual Personae, p. 46) 

The phrase “nurturant male” offers a dazzling insight into the funny men in control of the late night airwaves. The late night host is a different kind of comic, more gentle in spirit and supportive by nature than the aggressive standup with the take-no-prisoners mentality. 

In recent months Stephen Colbert has played the role of healer in the era of Trump. Donald Trump does not have a serious political rival from the Democratic party. Bernie Sanders plays a leadership role from the left, but Trump's true adversaries are the comedians. Alec Baldwin, playing Trump on SNL, played a significant role in the political dialogue with his brilliant mockery of Trump's hair, mannerisms, speech, narcissistic demeanor, and all-around bluster. Baldwin could not don (pun) the Don Trump wig forever. The job fell to Stephen Colbert to take the Trump bull by the horns. Colbert would wrestle the bull downward using the comedian's toolkit.

Colbert earned his stripes with Jon Stewart Daily Show and on the Colbert Report playing his Bill O'Reilly sendup, a faux conservative done totally tongue-in-cheek. As Tonight Show host, Colbert could emerge as the real Colbert, closer to his personal beliefs and a more nurturant male. He has used the opening monologues and his comedic talents to calm some of the nation's angst. Colbert, as late night shaman, offers a enlightened man's sensibilities as a contrast to harsh worldview of Donald Trump. Colbert's rise in the rankings proves the talk show host remains relevant, perhaps now more than ever-- in our totally electrified universe. Trump tweets all day and Colbert answers at night.

SNL spoofs Trump/ Holt interview-- Struggling to Keep Up

Watched Saturday Night Live (SNL) last night. Melissa McCarthy was guest host and her opening theme was Mothers Day and she even brought a middle-aged Mom out of the audience, probably planted there, as part of her opening routine. She provided a backstage tour for the Mom and offered a glimpse of the inner workings SNL, Lorne Michael's amazingly durable comedy show. That was fun, and reminded the viewers that the show really is theater, somewhat reminiscent of any other kind of live theater but with the addition of TV cameras and a national audience.

Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump has become a regular feature of the opening minutes of the show and last night was no exception. Trump's interview with Lester Holt about the firing of James Comey was recreated-- an event that happened only a day or two earlier. Things move faster. The real Donald Trump felt the need to get quickly to the airwaves when he saw the country meltdown in reaction to the Comey decision. The Trump/Holt interview went out to the entire country, maybe the world, and was rapidly absorbed into the nation's collective conscious. The news volley, much like a tennis match, flies quickly and comedy must follow suit. Anything too old in the 24/7 news cycle would not work well for the SNL parody.

Michael Che playing Lester Holt did an awesome job capturing the even-keeled television newsman. The comic summoned up Holt  so accurately-- big forehead, cool, friendly, but always professional, the expressionless expression, had a certain hysterical quality. The real Lester Holt must be about as far as you can get from a SNL skit. And Michael Che actually does the "Weekend Update" segment for SNL so has some of the news anchor instincts already built in.

Baldwin was good as always and made the point that Trump is kind of a mini-Nixon, not exactly my position on the issue. But having Speaker Paul Ryan show up as an overly solicitous, ass-kissing soda fountain jerk with two scoops of ice-cream for Donald Trump was ingenious. Donald insists on two scoops of ice-cream because Richard Nixon only got one scoop of ice-cream. Baldwin and the writers had captured the Donald Trump narcissism and the Republicans fear of offending Trump with great comic efficiency.

So this skit earned an A grade-- but made me wonder about the hurry up nature of our existence-- even comedy must reflect events from only a day or two ago... or it becomes old news.

Stop Making Sense: politics as theater

Stop Making Sense... for the game has changed.

It may be worth mentioning ... with the computer there has risen the possibility of extending consciousness itself as a technological environment. If this is to be done, it cannot be done on the basis of any existing notion of rationality.-- 1971 (Marshall McLuhan)

Marshall McLuhan died in 1980 but remains the only man who understands the computer/ internet age, an age he predicted with absolute accuracy. McLuhan knew that computer technology would shift the individual's "central nervous system into the electro-magnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well."-- 1964.

That means your brain and central nervous system are right there in the cellphone you are grasping. You have uploaded your thoughts and emotions into Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. You are vibrating with the universe. The world is one big city. The global village... as McLuhan so aptly named this world we now inhabit. You, and all of us, and Trump, our tribal leader, are family.

So this new world has you scared. We are all sitting around the electronic campfire and people are shouting weird things into the air. These thoughts, the fake news, the insane fears, the terrorism, the 11 year old boy in the Bronx using a knife to protect his mother from an intruder to their apartment... all of that, along with the Kardashians, Sean Spicer, Melissa McCarthy, etc., all spinning around your brain and spinal chord thanks to that powerful computer in your hand. You are the right, you are the left, you are all of it.

And most prevalent of all images is the image of Donald Trump, that orange-haired image has been burned into your consciousness. His name is on everybody's lips. The cable news follows his every exhalation and exultation. You wince-- how did he work himself into your consciousness? You and I are Trump.

I notice that Trump remains ahead of the men and women of the news. They are stuck in the print era like newsmen out of the screwball classic His Girl Friday. All they lack are Cary Grant's fedora and the clever lines of dialogue. The television newspeople-- still called "the press"--  struggle to find rationality in Donald Trump's ravings and whine about fake news and alternative versions of reality. The game has changed and Trump rubs it in with references to "the failing New York Times."

The New York Times worldview, the serious, sober reporting from the Gray Lady, falls to pieces in the lightning war of electrons-- the all spin, all the time world in which we presently live. If you are waiting for Truth... fuhgeddaboutit. 

Truth has given way to theater and image-making. Trump knows it and discovered it from his experience with the New York City tabloid newspapers-- not the New York Times.

Every day another drama-- just like the tabloid covers of the New York Post (conservative) and the New York Daily News (liberal).

The difference between now and just a few years back is the depth of our involvement. The Social Network has us all involved. And it moves at the speed of light. Just ask Bill O'Reilly. The master of the "No Spin Zone" got spun like a top and left by the curb by Fox News. I don't think O'Reilly got fired because Rupert Murdoch and his sons found new moral convictions about the rights of women. The global village decided to shun O'Reilly. Twenty-first Century Fox quickly jumped aboard.

The Fox News empire knows that the electronic network electrocutes quickly. They didn't have time to take a poll-- they stuck their fingers in the air and felt the electronic wind blowing hard against O'Reilly's bullying, sexist tendencies. They didn't want to piss off a whole gender-- and O'Reilly hit the road, $25 million in his pocket to ease the pain. And, in some strange way, we feel Bill's pain. After all, we got to know him so well.

An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness.-- 1964 (Marshall McLuhan)



references:
The Talking Heads album-- Stop Making Sense (1977)--
McLuhan quotes from Essential McLuhan (1995)-- p. 296.
"Piss off a whole gender..."-- this line taken from Aziz Anasari's monologue on SNL