Does anyone still read Newsweak?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 15th, 2009

We suppose that a handful of troglodytes that can’t quite catch on to this new internet thing still read it. But even more pathetic are the people still writing for Newsweak. Sarah Ball is one of them. Her articles are sequestered in the Culture section, under “The Arts and Other Pursuits.”

One of Ball’s “other pursuits” seems to be writing articles like this one that make her resemble that bitter blowhard party gal– the one that’s had one too many vodka gimlets and ceases to converse with fellow partygoers and instead starts to bellow loudly and berate anyone with a differing opinion.

“12 Comics Who Aren’t Funny” is the title of the piece, a slideshow, complete with a pic of each comic and a dollop of arch commentary. However, besides being late to the party (haven’t we already seen a dozen or so articles exactly like this in various lad mags and on the occasional tiny, pipsqueak website?), Ball and Newsweak, in their unseemly desire to purvey the snark, seem a bit like stepdad throwing around hip-hop lingo as they diss such multi-millionaire entertainers as Jeff Dunham, Jay Leno and Yakov Smirnoff.

Ball also takes the dusty, obligatory shots at Gallagher, Dane Cook and Larry The Cable Guy. All the while dropping names, words and phrases that the kids might recognize. If you would have told us ten years ago that a major newsweekly would have sunk this low, we would have judged you crazy. We’re revising our drop-dead date for Newsweek (and Time!) forward a few months– we suspect that they’re last hard copy editions will hit the stands some time in 2011. (And their online editions will sink, with a faint sucking sound, into the infotainment soup that is the internet quickly thereafter and cease to generate enough revenue to pay for the electricity it takes to host them.)

This wretched hag even goes after Emo Phillips!

If you saw Emo Philips’s (sic) jokes written on paper, you’d probably laugh. To hear him deliver them is another story. Philips’s (sic) meandering, high-pitched, pseudo-deadpan delivery leaves you wanting to rip your hair out, and it makes his surrealist yarns impossible to follow.

We hear that one of the side effects of Xanax is irritability. This assessment reminds The Male Half of a Christmas morning several years ago when he dropped the needle on Neil Young’s “After The Gold Rush,” and Paternal Grandmother screwed up her face and said, “Oh, who is that? She’s terrible!”

Were we feeling more charitable, we would say that Newsweak’s readers deserve better. But, upon further consideration, we have decided that they are getting exactly what they deserve.

Here’s what the article should have/might have been called: “12 Comedians I Don’t Think Are Funny, by Sarah Ball.” It’s all calculated to be young, hip and all up in your grill and shit– witness the tag on the final slide:

Unamused, or amused by our ratings? Or want to add your own candidates? Give us your take in the comments below.

It’s pure provocation, probably dreamed up by some douchebag editor at the magazine who no doubt took a weekend seminar on “How To Make Your Website ‘Sticky!'” The seminar might as well have been called “Rearranging The Deck Chairs on the Titanic: Stirring Up Mindless Arguments For A Few Thousand Unique Visitors!”

We’re reminded of TRL’s crawls in which various vacuous teens argued passionately over whether Mark McGrath or Gavin Rossdale would prevail in a bar fight.

Sadly, some comics will eat this up. They’ll dutifully register and throw in their candidates for “Comics Who Aren’t Funny,” thinking that it will simultaneously help standup comedy in general and give themselves a boost in the business. All it will do, however, is help Newsweak pander to simpletons who like to trash standup comics in general and disparage the legitimate entertainment choices of millions of Americans.

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