Latest / Letter to America / Cracking Up

Transcript

Cracking Up · Letter to America

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: The 50th anniversary of SNL last year made me realize how long it had been since I had regularly watched.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I've missed it, since we moved here especially.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: My earliest memories of it were from the late 70s when I used to wake up to the sound of my parents laughing in the other room late at night and wander out to see them sitting on the couch and gasping hysterically.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have fond memories of snuggling up with them on the couch and falling asleep in their laps, listening to their laughter.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: My parents were big fans of comedy, and political satire in particular.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up with comedy albums Flip Wilson, Tom Lehrer, Nichols and May.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Records that I listened to so many times that I know long passages by heart to this day.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: When I was finally living in the U.S., one thing that I embraced wholeheartedly was humor.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: American political humor is such an important part of our culture.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: It sets us apart and makes foreign leaders squirm even more than her own.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I loved it.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: SNL in particular.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: The parodies of presidents, perhaps most of all.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: One prime example came from Tina Fay's return to SNL after her very successful run from 97 to 2006 that culminated in many years of her serving as head writer.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was a high watermark to me in comedy, in satire specifically.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: September 27, 2008, Sarah Palin, I mean Tina Faye's Sarah Palin, made a second cameo on Saturday Night Live.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I've never laughed harder in a parody.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Her first spoof earlier in the month was a masterclass in the subtle and not so subtle exaggerations that turn a wisecrack into a takedown.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: The one that took a Palin quotation, You could actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, and twisted it into I can see Russia from my house.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was the one that will haunt Sarah Palin forever.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something she never actually said.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Later that month, Palin was interviewed by CBS evening news anchor Katie Couric.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Tina Fay's second appearance on SNL was next level.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Fay's Palin sat down with Katie Couric, played by Amy Polar.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: They used many close to verbatim responses from the actual CBS interview.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Almost instantly, side-by-side videos were created and shared broadly on social media that featured Faye delivering virtually exactly what Palin herself had actually said.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was a preview in many ways of the media environment we now live in, a climate where everyone, politicians and comedians included, can have direct, unmediated access to the public.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: People's actual words are often not just in the news, but make the news themselves.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: In the past few weeks, Colin Joast, who's been doing a parody of PegSest this season on SNL, and is the current co-host of Weekend Update, revealed the story that takes this satirical trend once again to the next and perhaps final level.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: In an interview on The Tonight Show, Joast revealed that in the writer's room at SNL he had pitched an idea.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Would it be funny if Heggseth just did that Bible verse that they have in Pulp Fiction?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Remember from Ezekiel Samuel L.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Jackson?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: The other writers apparently shot it down, saying it was, quote, too ridiculous.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: A matter of weeks later, in real life, the real Pete Hegseth spoke at a Pentagon prayer service.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: He called on everyone to join him and read a prayer that echoed the tweaked version of Ezekiel that Jackson had delivered in Quintin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I had to read the report a couple of times to get what happened to sink in.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: SNL didn't create an exaggerated parody of something that hadn't really happened, like the Russia from my house quote.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: They hadn't done what Fay did the second week, use a verbatim script to make something that actually happened even funnier in satire.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: They had deemed an idea too ridiculous, even for an SNL parody.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And a couple of weeks later, the very concept that Joest had pitched, the very too ridiculous idea, was delivered in actual reality at the Pentagon.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: My sister happened to be in Toronto when I was thinking about this, and I remembered another non-satirical real-life character who was hilarious to me at the time.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: The tragic comic actual former mayor of Toronto, Robert Ford.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: He was elected in 2010 to stop the gravy train, anti-waste, tax cutting, anti-downtown elite populism.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: He became one of the earliest gaff-proof populists that have since taken over politics in many places around the world, and seemed to get away with anything.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: There were allegations of domestic disturbances, alcohol and drug abuse, public intoxication at a St.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Patrick's Day parade, among others.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, allegations of smoking crack on camera.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't make this stuff up.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Too ridiculous.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, I remember realizing that it was funny, at least partly because he was a global punchline, but nobody's mirror.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Except Toronto.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: So unless he were from Ontario or Canada, there was a safe distance from which to view the slow motion train wreck and laugh out loud.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, SNL got onto that bandwagon too, with press conference apologies in a November 2013 cold open, featuring, among other things, a dealer delivering drugs to the podium.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: The hilarious sketch ends with Ford looking for a program gullible enough to believe in him and landing on 60 minutes.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: About seeing his own parody on Saturday Night Live, Ford said, It was crazy, man.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Of course he did.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: I realized then that that meant that if he were elected mayor this fall versus 13 years ago, he'd be the mayor in the town where my sister and dad will be living, and in a country I am now from.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me back to CBS News.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Decades from that Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin, decades from broadcast television and the network news commanding an audience, and a place in the Zeitgeist worth a punchline on SNL.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And now the very journalist who became the CBS News anchor after Katie Couric, Scott Pelley, has been in the news himself, due to his recent firing after 37 years.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: CBS News is where Edward R.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Murrow went toe-to-toe with Senator Joseph McCarthy, where Walter Cronkite declared the Vietnam War, quote, mired in stalemate, leading almost directly to LBJ's decision not to seek re-election.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is the network where Dan Rather held Nixon's feet to the fire on Watergate.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's also the network that canceled the late show with Stephen Colbert, ending a long storied run of news parody and truthiness.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: From his early days on the Daily Show as a satirical right-wing correspondent to his run as a comedic version of Bill O'Reilly hosting the Colbert rapport, his rally to restore sanity and or fear with John Stewart, he embodied the thing he was satirizing so completely it was hard to distinguish him from his tartan.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: His peak performance with probably the White House correspondence dinner in 2006, in character, his deadpan praise for George W.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Bush, leaving him and his wife Laura, watching, stonefaced.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: His satirical sustained attack on the press from his fake right wing position, hitting mainstream media for their proximity to power.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: The reception was cold and marked by forced laughter and awkward silences, especially among the elite near the stage.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: He was standing next to the ones he was supposed to roast in front of an audience he was meant to entertain.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he made both deeply uncomfortable and not amused.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: The broadcast audience was small, and the coverage buried it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Until, within days, it was one of the most talked about things on the internet.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: One of those early viral moments in the nascent YouTube and blogging era.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: The clip and transcript circulated everywhere.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Fans launched a site, thank you, Stephen Colbert.org, to express their admiration, and bloggers across the political spectrum fought over it, liberals hailing a rare rebuke to power, conservatives calling it tedious and unfunny.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's widely regarded as the moment that turned Colbert from a comedy central act into a truth to power news figure.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The gap became the story.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: The establishment presses near silence versus the hungry public devouring the speech.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: It read as the media declining to engage critics aimed at its own complicity, and a sign of audiences drifting from TV news toward blogs and websites.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Old media shrugged, new media made it a phenomenon to this day.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: The new media audience, a safe distance away, cracking up, sitting on their couches, staring at their phones, loved it.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is Handeleen, from Istanbul.