Tuesday, June 16, 2009

WE'RE STILL WAITING FOR PETER KING TO WEIGH IN BY MISSING THE POINT: It was not that long ago that it might have taken a few days for the "outrage" about Artie Lange's appearance on The Joe Buck Show to metastasize into "outrage"-about-the-"outrage". While Will Leitch accurately noted that part of the problem was Buck's inability to wrest back control of his show, I want to focus on one underreported aspect -- perhaps the only one left: Lange wasn't that funny (video NSFW). Merely saying shocking words to someone not expecting to hear them isn't inherently funny -- it just makes you a lazier Sarah Silverman. Nothing he said actually made me laugh -- the most I got was a slight sense of amusement at watching sanctimonious Buck squirm. When Shaquille O'Neal can pack more effective homophobic humor into a single tweet (context here) than Lange could in eight minutes, that's saying something.

[Also, both Jason Sudeikis and Paul Rudd sadly played the role of Braylon Edwards to Lange's Buzz Bissinger, staying out of the fray rather than intervening on behalf of a host who needed it.]

When someone's given space on television to call into question viewers' fundamental assumptions about the justice of a market-based economy, their belief in a higher power or the necessity of a "war on drugs," then we can talk about someone being "outrageous." Until then, I'll just say the world misses Bill Hicks.

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