Fact-checking the comedians
So… comedians are finally doing their job (at least Fred Armisen is) and what happens? Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room gets off its ass to do a “fact check” segment (3:48 in length!!) and analyze the veracity of the claims made by an SNL cast member in the show’s opening monologue.
That is a lot of time to devote in a nightly broadcast to the dissection of a comedy sketch. What exactly is going on here?
To our knowledge, no newscast has ever gone to the trouble of fact-checking a comedy sketch before. About any politician of either party. To dredge up an oft-used phrase from a past era, where’s the outrage? Where’s all the talk of a “chilling effect” on free speech? Will it follow? We’re not holding our breath.
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And then Brett Michael Dykes, writing for the Yahoo! News Blog (“The #1 News Site,”), engages in several hundred words of analysis of Armisen’s monologue. He concludes with this:
So, taking all of this into consideration, are SNL’s satirical criticisms of President Obama’s do-nothingness valid? Probably not, mainly because, as illustrated by the old adage about how one shouldn’t watch sausage or legislation get made, the process of “change” and getting anything done in Washington is a long and messy one, and Obama is merely nine months into his term as president. But that doesn’t mean that Saturday’s SNL skit was humorless, which, for once, it most definitely was not.
First CNN, now Yahoo! Has any president ever needed this much protection from… jokes?