Okay, I've watched last night's White House Correspondents Dinner and am officially appalled. There's always something a bit "wrong" to me about reporters and the folks they cover intermingling this way; not that they shouldn't be civil to one another but the unbridled shmoozing makes you wonder about the sincerity of both sides.
Entertainer Rich Little had a rough time of it, especially since his "opening act" was George W. Bush announcing that in light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, there would be no presidential attempts at humor that evening. I'm not sure I entirely follow the logic of that. Yes, it's awful and sad that 32 young people were killed and scores more were injured there. Would the president have gone out and yukked it up if that hadn't happened because, after all, the recent deaths of dozens of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis shouldn't get in the way of a good monologue? Nevertheless, it got Little off to a bumpy start. (When Lewis Black did a similar dinner a few years ago, he had to follow Dick Cheney talking about the death of the Pope. Hey, there's a topic that will always get an audience in the mood to laugh.) It's also an awkward spot when you're brought in to perform with the clear expectation that you'll offend no one on the dais or in the front row.
Still, it could have gone a lot better. Once upon a time, Rich Little was an impressionist of uncanny talent. He did people that no one else had ever done before and when he did the ones everyone else did, he did them better than just about anyone. The impersonations though often carried rather weak or hoary material…and now the jokes are no better but the impressions aren't as impressive. The late Stanley Ralph Ross, who wrote for Little, used to tell people who said the replicas were uneven, "Rich is on target about 50% of the time but no one can tell him about the half that isn't." That was easy to believe last night…though I'm not sure Little wasn't "righter" for the event than some of those they've had in recent years. I have the feeling that after last night's dinner, the person in charge of booking the talent got a lot more compliments than the person who booked Stephen Colbert.
It was kind of an amazing performance. For his Johnny Carson bit, Little used a very old joke that you heard in high school or before. It was the one about the guy who takes an apparent drunk home — a drunk who can't even walk — and then the wife says, "Thanks for bringing him home but where's his wheelchair?" It's not a bad joke but of course, it has nothing to do with Johnny Carson and left me wondering why Rich Little, who's been replicating Carson for more than a quarter-century, doesn't have material tailored for that impression. Next week, he could do that joke for his George Burns impression or his Jack Benny.
Oh, well. I suspect Mr. Little — who no longer plays his home town of Vegas very often — has earned himself a year or two of bookings from Republican-leaning organizations and auditoriums in more Conservative communities. He'll do the same impressions and in between, he'll talk about the honor of performing for The President and crowds will love him for it. You or I may not have thought he was funny last night but it was probably a great career booster.
One final thing which I must admit baffled me was a video — and here, I'll embed it and you can see if it baffles you, too. It's a David Letterman Top Ten List introduced by, of all people, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow. If someone got up in a major public forum and said that Bush was a stumbling idiot who had convinced a large part of America that he didn't know what he was doing, it would be Mr. Snow's job, if not his duty as a supporter, to rebut and denounce that view of his boss. Yet here he is, presenting a video to that effect, endorsing the importance of Dave Letterman, a celebrity who makes it quite clear on a nightly basis that he thinks Bush is a dangerous boob. The video includes no disclaimer. Dave does not say, "It's all in fun" or even "In spite of his gaffes, he's still my president." There are no such niceties…and one even senses a certain air of contempt in the fact that Letterman says so little, as if the clips speak for themselves.
So, uh, why is Tony Snow affording so much dignity to this video? Shouldn't his official position be that Letterman is all wrong about George W. Bush?
