Writing in this week's remarkable 90th anniversary edition of the New Yorker, it is perhaps appropriate two of the most remarkable pieces are written by the television critic, Emily Nussbaum. In the age of the internet, Facebook, cable TV, Netflix, television has re-emerged as a dominant force in culture and values.
Commenting on Jon Stewart's decision to leave, she suggests the place he occupied: "'The The Daily Show' became a gathering place for the disenchanted--a place that let viewers know they weren't crazy." And she is certainly right about that.
Thinking back to those dark days of George W. Bush's presidency, it is important to remember how the drumbeat to war obliterated rational discourse, save for "The Daily Show." She notes: "Stewart was a valuable corrective: he revived the notion that satire might be an expression of anger or sadness, the product of high standards, not a nihilistic game for know-it-alls."
Stewart's brand, Nussbaum neatly summarizes, was "decency."
Of course, that was also his weakness: when he did his Washington rally against gridlock, there was the frustration of seeing what ailed Washington portrayed as a "case of bad manners and not deep-seated ideological differences about government and its place in the world."
His critical innovation was the exploitation of "search technology." His staff found clips of various politicians and assembled them into "brutal montages--to expose lies that might have gone unremarked."
In the end, "that kind of digging, of disrespecting authority, was a model for reinventing journalism, not comedy," Nussbaum says. The Phantom is not sure it was all that, or that the "Daily Show" changed much in straight journalism. The executive producer of the "News Hour" once told the Phantom the New Hour staff loved "The Daily Show." The Phantom was too polite to ask, "Then why don't you learn from it? Why do you treat Michele Bachmann as someone with a point of view which deserves a respectful hearing, when she says the woman in the parking lot told Bachmann her daughter got autism from a vaccination?"
Nussbaum is more adroit when she analyzes Joan Rivers.
"Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money--and from men as the route to money--you were dead in the water."
Nussbaum encapsulates her insult comedy persona as an act based on "self-loathing, in the tradition of older female comics," but that loathing extended to other women who fell behind in the game. A River's line: Kate Winslet, nominated for an Academy Award, had sunk the Titanic with her fat arms. "She was the body cop who circled the flaws on every other powerful woman--she announced who was fat, who had no chin."
And that, Nussbaum finds deeply disquieting.
"But don't you think men really like intelligence?" Johnny Carson asked Rivers."No man has put his hand up a woman's dress looking for a library card," Rivers retorts.
Rivers, Nussbaum says, was a "fiery pragmatist...Men Are Stupid...They Like Big Boobs."
But, for the Phantom, the problem with Rivers is, she really did not know men. Or at least, she knew only one kind of man, only one culture, and not the newly emerged counter culture.
"A girl can't call. Girl, you have to wait for the phone to ring, right?"
Actually, wrong.
Speaking from what may be a limited and atypical experience, the Phantom has to object. He will concede, from his callow youth, the Phantom had to see something physically attractive in a woman--her blue eyes maybe, the way her hair caught the light maybe, something--but other flaws (hips a big too broad of beam or arms too ample) were nothing more than distinctive attributes, if she had the far more important characteristics of nerve, energy and simply being funny.
Rivers misses the key insight from that Louis C.K. scene in which Louis C.K. rebuffs the advances of an overweight waitress. "You know, the reason you aren't interested?" the waitress observes, cooly: "I'm fat. But, more important, you are fat. You know what? Good looking guys, guys with movie star good looks, come in here all the time and those are the guys who flirt with me. It's the fat slobs who won't even look me in the eye. It's the losers who won't give me a tumble."
For Rivers, small breasts were a curse which thwarted any ambition of landing the big fish. But, as Lewis Black observed: "You know, most female breasts are really beautiful." They can be small, like Goldie Hawn's or big; it really doesn't matter. So why all this concern about big breasts? As Black says, "They have surgery to make perfectly beautiful small breasts into beautiful big breasts. I don't get it."
The Phantom is totally with C.K. and Blackon this. The Phantom cannot say he even notices a woman's breasts. What strikes him, early on at least, is the total package, the gestalt, how the woman carries it off. Some women are all bubbly Goldie Hawn; others are ice princess Grace Kelly, who only listen and respond minimally, while they observe you mercilessly. Both can be very attractive. But, trying to describe what turned you on about a woman, you never mentioned any of the things Joan Rivers mentioned. She really did not know what drew men to women.
Eventually, a woman has to make her move, just as surely as a man does. The girl who waits to be called is really, at core, pretty uninteresting. That sort of female passivity lost its allure when Scarlet O'Hara grabbed Ashley in the library and told him how she felt and what she wanted. To look at college campuses today, one would think the new paradigm is it is the woman who should kiss the man, not the other way round, at least if you want to be politically correct.
Then again, college campuses may be the anomaly. The fact remains, the girl whose only option is to look so pretty the phone will ring is a very 1950's idea.
Somehow, Joan Rivers missed that.
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