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It’s the last GLoP of the summer, but we’re not relaxing. The GLoP-sters (one of whom is working injured with a summer cold), cover which sections of the newspapers actually make money, a review of the current Broadway production of Oklahoma!, some Rank Punditry® on the Democratic race, John can’t hear us (a feature, not a bug?) and Dave Chapelle conquers the politics of comedy.
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And French POW LeBeau was played by Robert Clary, a survivor of Buchenwald. (He is still alive at 93.)
I think all these actors understood that depicting Nazis as the epitome of evil actually made them attractive to a certain type of mind, as we have learned the hard way in recent years.
Portraying them as ridiculous, on the other hand …
Exactly.
Strangely obtuse commentary from Jonah and JPod about Trump and his Federal Reserve chairman.
To me, it seemed like the usual Presidential jawboning, refracted through the usual Trumpian hyperbole.
Have JPod and Jonah been in a coma for the past three years?
It amazes me that Jon can take two of the funniest people around and make a podcast with them boring.
All the progressives I know seem to love playing Cards Against Humanity and have no trouble whatsoever laughing at the horrible things they end up saying. What does that say about who they really are on the inside, buried under all that PC veneer?
Remember Bill Clinton crying on cue when he saw the camera outside Ron Brown’s funeral? That’s what you’d have here — people on the left laughing at majorly un-PC humor with people around them they think they can trust, even if they share the same progressive views, while turning into woke scolds when they’re out with the general public, including progressives they don’t think they can trust, and who could brand them as Enemies of the State with a surreptitious iPhone recording and a viral social media post.
Why you’d want to live in Comedy Prohibition Hell and have to be on guard at all times for laughing at the wrong thing isn’t something I understand. But I suppose if your mindset is this is the way to brand the other side as h8ters and write them out of the public conversation, then it’s OK to create something else to be hypocritical about, when it comes to what you say in public and what you say in your own private life.
His superpower?
The alliteration of GLoP/pop is neat, but GLoB or BLoG with Sonny Bunch replacing Jon would be interesting.
I remember a discussion of the show once where the showrunner said he wanted the replacement for Frank Burns to be a William F. Buckley type so the political zingers would be more appropriate.
Haven’t played Crimes Against Humanity before but me’thinks it is far more gross than unPC. The first thing — gross — is fashionable in comedy these days. The second thing — unPC — is all but verboten.
Here, try this fun test: Practice your impressions around your Progressive friends. First, do an uptight white Southerner and really push the stereotype. Then, do a prissy white Englishman and once again, push the stereotype. And finally, do a couple of old black guys yacking in an inner-city barbershop. And as before, push the stereotypes!
Let me know how impressions 1 & 2 go for ya (I bet you get laughs!) But I’m particularly curious to know how impression 3 goes over.
My prediction: The smiles are going to drain from their faces when you start doing #3.
25 years ago, nobody gave a damn if comedians did voice impressions of people who didn’t look like them. But today, it’s a third rail.
And that’s example #8,258 of how PC has eroded entertainment and the culture.
Many of the cards are gross, but some can be very un-PC, with cards like “black people”, “the gays”, “beating your wives”, and “child abuse” inserted into sentences such as these. It’s an all-around disgusting game and I cannot fathom its appeal – especially when the people playing it are the same ones who got James Gunn fired.
Jordan Peterson defends vulgar humor pretty well I think.
Another video.
I happened to have the bandwidth near at hand, so I watched it. He is good.
Too bad he couldn’t have come to his senses BEFORE creating leftist propaganda that will endure for generations.
There is always time. He could interview a bunch of Vietnamese refugees and children of refugees and convince a new generation that Communism is a bad thing. It wouldn’t even come of as preachy if he just asked Vietnamese immigrants about their lives.
If Prelutsky had been a conservative back then, he would not have been permitted to write for M.A.S.H.
Which is why he should put the documentary on youtube or sell it online nowadays. Of course it isn’t easy but it’s doable.
… and will, no doubt, be seen by dozens of people!
Exactly. Nothing he could do now, would even begin to offset the amount of damage already done in his past.
Was M*A*S*H in and of itself that harmful? It wasn’t the only piece of anti-war propaganda around. And we are talking about the television show.
The book Catch 22 was probably more influential. I’d say that M*A*S*H the movie had more influence. Certainly, I watched the television series as a teenager, and my views on the war and the military were already formed. I took it for what it was, and enjoyed the early seasons before the show turned to crap.
Exactly. We’re talking about a TV show. Orders of magnitude more people see television programs than read a particular book or see a particular movie.
So influential to whom? How many people have read Catch 22? 106 million people watched the final episode of MASH. I’d be shocked to find that even half that ever saw the movie.
Just to bring the subject here full circle, in the months before he hit it big with the anti-war Catch 22, Joseph Heller made a few bucks for himself by penning one of the first episodes of McHale’s Navy:
M*A*S*H the movie is terrific. Fair warning to all Ricochet members, though: Although its attitude toward women is retro in the extreme, Altman’s film is not remotely Conservative. Indeed, it actively mocks Christianity, thumbs its nose at military authority, and treats the Korean War as a thinly-veiled stand-in for Vietnam.
That said, it’s a great film. Funny, beautifully acted, and pioneering (Altman’s use of overlapping and seemingly improvised dialogue set a new standard for naturalistic comedy that has seldom been equaled and whose effects are still being felt today — maybe more than ever).
Television shows, especially of that three networks era, were more cautious on what they put out. Catch 22 and movies like Dr Strangelove had more influence while television shows were simply going along with what the public thought. They didn’t lead, they lagged.
No one took television seriously back then. It was just entertainment. And the higher number of viewers also indicates it was mostly vanilla entertainment.
M*A*S*H the television show didn’t change many minds, and viewers really didn’t go there for Alan Alda’s political views. Though the show stopped being funny, and had a feminist bent to it with the Hot Lips Houlihan character, I think the viewers were just invested in the characters, and not the politics.
As for the higher viewership for the last show, it was because it was a long running television show that was having their last show. Their ratings flagged during their penultimate season, but went back up during their last season because everyone knew it was their last season.
I just watched the first few minutes of the that episode, and it does have a “Joe Heller” Catch 22 motif to it.
The premise for the show is that enlisted man stole a PT boat alone to go to a beach party (and lost it). That sounds just as unlikely as many of the hijinks in Catch.
Could not disagree more. Fish don’t notice the water they’re swimming in. The politics of a mass media show like MASH become ingrained in the audience.
And even if some/many people disagree with the messages, those who already agree or come to agree get to point to it and say “See? I’m right!” Even though it is only a TV show.
For some evidence, it’s not hard to look around and find people who actually seem to believe that crime – or war or violence in general in terms of MASH – is actually somehow caused by OPPOSING it. I don’t think it’s possible to come up with that nonsense on their own. It’s so counter-obvious, it’s like an old expression from my past, “an idea so obviously ridiculous, only someone with a Ph.D could believe it.”
I think it was Orwell: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
That may be where it originated, but I find it insufficiently insulting to (most) people with Ph.Ds. :-)