What happens when you assume?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 21st, 2004

Under the title “Rebuilding an Antiwar Movement for 2005,” a writer on a website that seeks to coordinate various anti-war activities (and frequently compares President Bush to Hitler) wrote the following:

….perhaps we should all remember being at a rally one time or another and being damned bored with the speakers. This is where we should learn a lesson, both from my hometown, and from the NED and their street activities in the Ukraine. We had rock bands and rappers and DJs at our rallies. People go to rallies to add their bodies to an influx against war, not to hear a professor who they have read many times and comes off better from the page than the pulpit. The Barenaked Ladies, among other groups, led many rallies. It helps that in Canada, the cultural industry is very left wing, but representatives of the American cultural industry have a very special responsibility. Rallies as well should not be hosted by the typical campus moralizer in their best Bill Moyers/Jesse Jackson guilt-rendering liberal tone, but by, perhaps, standup comics. Every city has a standup community. Standup comics are almost universally antiwar.

Say what? To be sure there are some comics who have registered their discontent with the war, but almost universally antiwar? Tell that to all the comics who have travelled, at considerable risk, to the Persian Gulf to entertain the troops. And tell that to all the comedians who regularly perform on USO tours or who perform for servicemen and women here at home. (In fact, we here at SHECKYmagazine will be performing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base Feb. 26!) Hasn’t this chucklehead heard about the Comics On Duty Tour? Didn’t he read our excellent piece here in the pages of this magazine by Steve Mazan? And, maybe we’re a little touchy, but doesn’t the way this whole thing is pitched seem a bit presumptuous? Need something to perk up your anti-war rally? Go get a comic! There are just hundreds of them laying around in every major city. Go get one! What’re you waiting for?

How does this idea that standup comics are “universally anti-war” get started? How does one year of Janeane Garofalo quoting Howard Zinn on The View wipe out forty years of Bob Hope? And in October our showcase at the New York Underground Comedy Festival, and many of the other shows at the festival, benefited Operation Uplink, an organization that seeks to keep military personnel and hospitalized veterans in touch with their families and loved ones.

P.S. If you’re interested, you can check out Bob Hope– The Vietnam Years (1964-1972), a collection of Hope’s performances throughout Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war. It might ring a few bells.

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