Why We Can’t Get Enough of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher

May 18, 2009 | nyupressblog | Law, Media Studies

An excerpt from Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, edited by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson. Go to Alternet to read the full article.

With All Due Respect: Satirizing Presidents from Saturday Night Live to Lil’ Bush
by Jeffrey P. Jones

Embodying his on-screen persona as a conservative talk show host, faux television pundit Stephen Colbert offered a mouth-dropping satirical performance as the featured speaker at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006. As is typical in his television parodies on Comedy Central, Colbert proceeded to lambaste both the press and the president, neither of whom seemed to appreciate the effort. Not to make the same mistake twice, the organizers of the 2007 event took a safer route by hiring the crowd-pleasing presidential impersonator Rich Little for the evening’s entertainment. But in reviving the long-since flagged career of the former late-night talk show staple, the event organizers reminded us of just how far television has come in its caricatures of presidents. For also appearing that same week on Comedy Central was the animated series, Lil’ Bush, a portrayal of George W. Bush as a dim-witted and dangerous fifth-grader running amok in the White House and wreaking havoc across the world with his diabolical pals Lil’ Cheney, Lil’ Condi, and Lil’ Rummy. The airing of these two different sets of caricatures demonstrated that the acceptable norms of television’s treatment of the president have certainly changed.

Yet this was not the first time that Comedy Central had produced an entire series dedicated to satirizing President Bush. Beginning in April 2001, the network aired a short-lived series called That’s My Bush!, a show with the announced intention of spoofing the sitcom genre, but also satirizing the current president and his family and staff in the process. In the series, George W. Bush and Laura Bush are portrayed as the typical suburban sitcom couple, yet George is also painted as a simple-minded, lazy, privileged, and easily distracted man. The show’s writers and producers, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame, had planned to produce the program irrespective of which presidential candidate won the 2000 election (Bush or Al Gore). But with Bush emerging victorious in the contested election, he became the focus of the show. In turn, the series became the first bold move by the network in satirizing a sitting president in a not-so-flattering manner.

Read More.

nyupressblog
Website | + posts