I don't get IFC channel, but because I read Sitting On The Edge of The Sandbox, Biting My Tongue and her great blog I don't have to. She's a fan of "Portlandia", a show on IFC. Check out her take.
The real white people are not in New Hampshire, and certainly not in Iowa or South Carolina. The real white people are in the Pacific North-West, and they are California transplants.
We started watching Portlandia on a Big Hollywood tip, and I can’t believe nobody told us about it last year. Like Stuff White People Like, a blog I proudly feature on my blogroll under humor, Portlandia ridicules mores and tastes of white upper middle class liberals.
...Liberals making fun of themselves, quite maliciously so at times, is nothing new. What’s surprising is that self-mockery is coming from Carrie Brownstein of a super-earnest grrrl band Sleater-Kinny and Fred Armisen who sabotages Obama skits on SNL. I suspect Brownstein and Armisen feel liberated to be funny on Portlandia only when they are performing for an elite audience of like-minded white liberals.
All I know is that this is the funniest Fred Armisen has ever been in his entire half-assed comedy career.
Watch him in this Saturday Night Live opening skit. Get your pillow and blankie for when you doze off 25 seconds in.
Granted, the writers gave Armisen a whole 2.3 jokes to fill a three minute bit. It's hard to be funny there isn't anything remotely resembling humor anywhere in the material. That doesn't excuse Fragile Fred for his ponderous performance. Armisen doesn't deliver a punchline so much as wrestle it to the ground, tear it open, light it on fire, stuff it into your mailbox, then look at you with pleading eyes desperately craving your approval.
One gets the sense that Armisen--and SNL in general--can't really go after Obama all that hard. They don't want to hammer the President because he's their guy. SNL, along with the rest of the court jester/palace guard media, will not humiliate the politician that most reflects their values. So they pull their punches at every opportunity, which not only makes them kool-aid drinkers but incredibly boring as well.
But the shackles come off when slightly famous liberals can make fun of average everyday liberals on a cable TV show. Watch the Portlandia clip.
Oh well. We'll call that progress.
Funny, timely and just a little self-deprecating to boot. Wow. It's amazing what one can do when you're not shooting jokes in the balls so they don't hurt your side of the political spectrum.
What's really cool is how "Portlandia" is pretty much the proggy version of Larry The Cable Guy. I know liberals--especially bitter old hacks like David Cross-- hate Larry The Cable Guy. What the lefties can't get is that Larry isn't glorifying the hillbilly peckerwood lifestyle, he's satirizing it. His material pokes fun at the silliness of the South. He's a conservative Southerner laughing with--and at--other Southerners.
It's easier to take jokes from your own people, rather than take them from an outsider. Irishmen can call their fellow Emerald Islanders drunk bog-trotting micks and it's all good. If Germans were actually capable of generating humor, they'd start by calling themselves humorless krauts and then they'd politely giggle about it under their breath.
Same thing with Southerners. They know Cable Guy is having a laugh at their expense. But they can take it from him because a) he's one of theirs and b) they know Larry's bits are based in the reality of Southern life.
"Portlandia" is the comforting laugh that lefties can have on themselves. Conveniently, it's also the laugh conservatives can have on liberalism too. That's always nice.
