In contrast, Colbert aligns himself with the crazy world, and then presents himself as if he were challenging you, a member of the opposite team.
I have no idea what the post generally is blathering about, but, on this point, every single time I watch Colbert, I'm genuinely shocked to recall that many conservatives seem not to realize that it's intended as satire. It's so obviously satire that I... just... well... I'm genuinely shocked, is all.
I have no idea what the post generally is blathering about
That was some unprovoked little bitchery.
This is too confusing for me at this time of the night. I should move to California so I'm behind you so far as time zones go.
In the future present, all criticism will be is television criticism.
2: No, little bitchery would be pointing out that your usage of "little bitchery" here isn't really in accordance with traditional usage of that phrase.
But, really, I'm not trying to be unpleasant.
7: You little bitched outside the box.
8: Eh, no one seems to know what I'm talking about, so you've got numbers on your side.
I found the post both easily understandable and insightful. Don't let the haters get you down, heebie.
One of my favorite thing about Colbert is what makes him actually break character. In particular, it's the actual Colbert who's a huge Lord of the Rings and role-playing dork, not the character. Similarly, it's the actual Colbert who loves to sing and likes breaking into song with his musical guests.
many conservatives seem not to realize that it's intended as satire
I still want this explained to me. It makes me think conservativism is some sort of thought disorder. I assume they don't have a theory of mind.
And this post is perfectly intelligible.
I too am drunk. Do I have to go to bed?
19: Absolutely. Any insight that people are attributing to me is really due to her.
I'm drunk and I don't even own a television.
18: No, it's really more a matter of who's on my team. Drunk people on my team can stay and party.
L2 bitchery
I keep thinking Lebesgue Bitchery with p=2.
25: that's good, because that's what I meant!
GO TEAM!
I might have a television, but I really am at least a bit drunk.
Arguably L4-bitchery would have been funnier. I don't think so, though.
I was listening to some commentary on one of the Simpsons DVDs and apparently Ned Flanders has a following among conservatives.
I might have two televisions, but one is in the basement and not hooked to any input source.
I am drinking wine on my mother's couch, but I am not drunk. I did listen to my mother's running narration/commentary on an episode of NCIS, so why I am not drunk remains a mystery.
I am buzzed and listening to this which I also learned about from you guys. I think I'm going to bed soon, though.
I am not drunk, but given how little I have to do tomorrow I should probably drink something else. Maybe I'll have some fernet.
I mean, she raps about how her cat will beat you up.
I wanted to walk over five miles today, so I had to get the last two miles by going to and from the bar.
On the opposite end from Bennett, you have the "I can't hug every cat" sort of thing which is only funny if it IS a fictional character.
Excerpt of the post heebie is referring to.
Texts from Bennett isn't really humor in the Colbert mode. Really Mac Lethal is playing the role of Stewart and he has invented a fictional person to be Colbert. He invites you to be on his side, feeling bemused condescension for Bennett. But he is also Bennett, pretending to be someone you can feel superior too.
I still like the pancake rap, though.
38: thanks for that. I didn't know any of it was still online. Clearly my memory lost a few levels that the original piece was operating on.
40: I was afraid someone would point that out. But as Bennett, a made-up person, he's like Colbert.
The privacy activist side of me wonders if I should have posted that link, since the whole post is no longer up.
(I don't have a copy. I found that link by searching for a phrase from another blog I read at the time, which had a short excerpt of the original.)
Like, insofar as Bennett is an exaggeration, the way Colbert is.
It would be pretty easy to flag awb and redact if she'd like us too. I'll go shoot her a message.
This is good fernet. I got it from this weird liquor store in the sticks that I guess bought it on a whim but then was never able to sell it, as by the time I walked in it had been discounted to less than half of what it sells for at retail.
I still want this explained to me.
I think it's likely that Colbert's jokes come off to many conservatives as affectionate, friendly ribbing. I don't think they're entirely wrong. Even at the White House dinner, some of Colbert's most pointed shots were aimed at the media, and there's nothing even slightly ironic about his respect and admiration for soldiers. Conservatives like that stuff.
If only AWB were still blogging somewhere, perhaps in some obscure, non-internetty corner of the internet.
47 is exactly right.
Perhaps conservatives are mocking us for not realizing that Colbert's mockery of them is just good-natured ribbing.
Meanwhile, on my headphones: "Can I spend the NIGHT at your HOUSE?"
46: The not at all fancy slightly scroungy liquor store on 2d Ave. sells 16yo Lagavulin for $67. I can only guess they bought a whole bunch and then could never move it?
Ok, my mixtape is over, and I'm going to bed. Sweet dreams all!
51: I mean that's even weirder. I can imagine that nobody in this liquor store had ever heard of Santa Maria Al Monte Amaro, but... $14.99? For real? It's a bigass bottle...
One of the ways I've thought to explain my preference for Stewart over Colbert is that Stewart seems to have some really clever writers who make his show packed with good jokes. Colbert has good writers, too, and it's a very elaborate joke they're pulling off. But it's the same elaborate joke, episode to episode.
The Lagavulin price is pretty standard. $14.99 for Santa Maria Al Monte is crazy good.
Who's the Boss was the same way, kind of.
55: It's $20 more than that in OH and Chicago!
I have a bi-weekly gig at the link in my name, with some familiar and less-familiar folks. But yeah, not all the time anymore. I did some stuff under my real name in the direction of a reading group, but I don't think people had the free time they thought they would and I ended up doing a lot of the daily writing myself. It's nice to have an assignment!
I do wish I had the archives from that post, which was just before I switched to Wordpress. Whenever I took down the WP stuff, I remembered to save it.
The problem back in 2006 was there weren't millions of blogs, so it wasn't that hard to get way too big of an audience. I kept quitting not because it wasn't going anywhere, but because when I wrote that and it got linked from some MSN blog, I couldn't handle the pressure or the traffic or the rape threats. Do you know how hard it is to earn a rape threat on the internet nowadays?
True fact: That blog was once quoted in the print edition of the weekend Washington Post. How much would you have to pay now to get a Post editor to scour random non-expert I-think-I-thunk-a-thought blogs for soundbites? Twitter killed the blog star.
Not counting our stalker with psychosis?
61 was me. 62: I guess that's part of why I don't hate him. It's like being reminded that the mid-2000's are still alive right here, where people talk about shit they don't really know about and get threatened with rape.
I didn't even notice that was on your pre-wordpress blog. Did you know you never blocked the internet archive off that blog?
64: Oh, can you access it through the hoo-hole? It doesn't bother me if it takes even minimal effort.
Yeah, put in the old URL into the internet archive's wayback thingamajig and it appears that the whole thing is there, including the post we're talking about here. Right now, the internet archive stuff is not in the search engines, at least, and I don't think they've developed their own text search either.
But if you want to take it out of the archive, you can still do that, I think, by editing the old blogger page.
Cool! Here's the post in full, for those who weren't with us in 2006:
Colbert and satire at the WHCA Dinner
Because I have a legendarily shitty internet connection, it took me all morning to download and finally view Stephen Colbert's appearance at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I had seen the Colbert Report a few times while visiting my parents' house and thought it was rather funny, but clearly a different type of satire altogether from Jon Stewart's more gentle Daily Show style. This difference might be at the heart of the bizarrely disparate responses Colbert's speech generated around the web (funny, not funny, flubbed, perfect, ballsy, weak, awesome, boring all at Metafilter, while Tia of Unfogged was inspired to offer herself as dam for Colbert's seed.)
While watching Stewart, you always know where he stands, though he uses ironic modes such as exaggeration, sarcasm, and understatement to expose the ridiculous excesses of his objects. This kind of satire aligns fairly well with the Horatian tradition that includes (Horace, duh, and) Ben Jonson, the second Earl of Shaftesbury, Henry Fielding, and so forth. Even if your opinions are being satirized, it's still funny, and its rhetoric is easy enough to swallow. It's pleasant, gentlemanly even, and you always know where you stand. When Horatian satirists find something that isn't just laughable but deeply reprehensible, they often turn to direct outrage as a response, rather than more biting satire. This is the kind of satire that usually goes over well at the Correspondents' dinner. Bush gleefully watches people mocking his ridiculous traits, such as his fake good-ol'-boy accent, his time spent on vacation, and his stupid way of mispronouncing words. It takes him down a peg, but doesn't remove him from the board completely.
Colbert's satire, as is obvious from his show, is of a much more upsetting kind, usually associated with the Juvenalian tradition (Defoe, Swift, Lenny Bruce, Pynchon, Gass, P. Roth, Wallace) of ironically realigning the subject position to the object's and describing things from that point of view in such a way that the object of satire becomes truly despicable. Instead of ridiculing some other party not present, this kind of satire invites the audience to apply their contempt (symbolically) to the speaker and then to the satirized object. While casting our ridicule onto the speaker, who is taking on the position of the object of scorn, we learn how to hate the object, while never knowing how to feel about the speaker or even who the speaker "really" is.
In his WHCA speech, Colbert is introduced by Mark Smith of the AP, who claims when Colbert "declared war" on the AP for failing to credit him with coining "truthiness," Smith had to call his boss to find out whether "we're laughing at this" or not, because it really was a slip-up on their part and heads could have rolled. It's a mild example of Colbert's effect, in that the object of satire wants to make a distinction between "funny" and "dangerous" that doesn't really exist. AP thinks if we laugh at Colbert's self-righteousness we won't see their error, but to laugh at Colbert is to learn to laugh at the self-righteousness of the constantly-erring press.
That's what made the audience at the Correspondents' dinner so deadly silent. Colbert made not-very-exaggerated statements that could easily have come out of the mouths of any pompous reporter or Republican flunky, statements that not only made the press and the administration look silly, but also hubristic, heedless, weak, and even murderous. Those of us who were not implicated by his speech could laugh freely at it. I didn't vote for this administration, and I certainly haven't enabled it through silence. Colbert embodied all those whose ambition, toadyism, and cowardice fuel Bush's whims, while also making it clear that only the "backwash" of Americans support his work as President anyway. To laugh at Colbert as a blowhard is to recognize the evil that his kind of blowhardery enables.
Those who were at that dinner may have merely experienced Colbert's talk as "not funny." I'm not sure it was meant to be funny, exactly. I think it was meant to serve as a crucible in which is concentrated all of the attitudes Americans should loathe, actively, and work to overcome.
So 2006, huh? So bloggy!
I miss those days. Well, except for the abusive and threatening commenters and lurkers and emailers.
On the one hand, everyone I know including me had at least one blog back in 2003/4 and has since quit blogging, and on the other hand, the internet is much more full of blogs now.
Maybe soon everyone will be blogging again. Tedra will lead the way.
I seem to have overreacted to having used a lot of short-post social media lately by putting up 2000 word posts when I returned to blogging.
But I'm still real, right? Even if Bennett's not? I'm still a real rabbit right?
69: I'm not very nostalgic for those days, even though I recognize that they were an important formative period for me personally.
It's amazing how long-lived the "non-urban white idiot who thinks it would be cool to be urban and black" trope has been, as a figure of fun that 99.999% of people can agree is ludicrous. With Bennett we may have reached the stage that there are so few truly oblivious people of this type that we have to reach into the realm of the urban legend to find one to make fun of.
I would say Bennett counts as less "urban legend" than "outright fraud."
74: I don't miss the literal days of my life, but I think a lot of the written internet that I follow for politics, academics, and cultural stuff is less interesting and more fragmentary now that a lot of it takes place across snippet media. Plus, there's been a lot of institutionalization of the long form writing that I do see.
Plus, there's been a lot of institutionalization of the long form writing that I do see.
This, definitely, and I do miss the more widespread long-form stuff. The snippet stuff is interesting in its way, though I think I follow less of it than you do.
What I do miss is the way many of the regulars here used to have personal blogs that were incorporated into the overall conversation in various ways. That's definitely atrophied, and I guess Facebook has taken its place to some extent but in a pretty different way.
The snippet stuff is fine, but I wish I could filter it better. I'm tired of links to "great" or "must read" stuff that I've read before packaged in different ways again and again. This does probably have a lot to do with what kinds of topics I follow.
So was Sifu using "fernet" as a generic term for amari?
79: I hate Facebook for that, because conversations there are so much less visible and more insular than they were when they were blog to blog. People check in but don't check out.
Meanwhile all the big blogs (traffic wise) have become adjuncts of traditional media and all the indies are largely ignored.
Bennett reminds me of the Rooster.
Of the blogs I discovered sometime in 2004-5, Unfogged and Crooked Timber are the 2 that have been continuously alive and well from then till now.
Many shut down or are on life support (BitchPhD, The Valve), and a few went through periods where it looked like they might fade away, but made a comeback (I'm thinking here of Feministe and maybe LG&M).
So what's Unfogged's secret? Simple boredom and ADD among the commentariate, or something more?
Our comments section turned into much more of a free-standing community than other blogs have: I think TNC's place is close, but I don't read his comments with enough attention to know the people there. Crooked Timber has long-standing regulars, but they're there to talk about the posts, not talk to each other.
And the community in the comments keeps the front page alive. First, it's something to feed -- not that I do often, but when you put up a post, it gets instant feedback, which is gratifying. Also, posts filter up -- not just formal guest posts, but ideas percolating around the comments make for posts.
I'm not sure why this place functions as a community better than most blogs -- we just acquired a critical mass of good commenters initially, and you guys have been attracting recruits ever since?
Also I think we've had a lower threshhold and broader range of what counts as a post, and I don't mean that as an insult. It's always been that way. It makes it much easier to feed the blog if you're allowed to just post "I sneezed really hard today". If I had to sound intelligent in every post, I'd have dried up in the first month.
Mostly I agree that what makes us sustainable is our comments. I just don't know the answer to why that emerged here but not elsewhere.
In fairness, you've thought a lot about sneezes.
Mostly I'm just very well practiced in the many ways to keep your eyes open when the urge strikes, thus preventing the sneeze itself. You're right, I do sound intelligent when I talk about sneezing!
You're my my number one source for sneeze-blogging.
I just don't know the answer to why that emerged here but not elsewhere.
Five letters, begins with "O".
I would also like to note that I began blogging in 2005, and commenting here in 2006, and it was a common theme that the golden years of blogging, 2002-2004, were long gone and I'd missed them entirely, too bad so sad.
75: I think it's mainly it's one of those things that each new generation thinks they invented. Well, "each new generation" isn't the right phrase since it's still not that old, but each cohort of high schoolers or whatever you'd call it. Teens don't know how old lots and lots of things are. I'd bet that for someone who's 14 right now, the Beastie Boys and Eminem are all one big blur.
As for the idea of some lost golden age of blogging, I kind of agree that most of what's out there is now is commercialized and/or more concise than we seem to like. But, well, you get what you pay for. Lots of small blogs out there no one reads. I have two; one is entirely personal and anyone can read it and no one cares, and the other is about work and I might some day try to turn it into a novel or something, but I'm being relatively careful to keep it anonymous, so you probably won't see it linked here unless well-disguised.
Another complicating factor is the fact that we all seem to read this from work. There's some blogs or other Web sites I used to read regularly that I can't because they were added to my office's blocked list (not a perfect example because they too were commercialized stuff, but still relevant), and some that I read at home but don't dare even try here here, and lots more that I might check out once in a while here but wouldn't feel safe reading regularly. At my office, tumblr, Facebook and Twitter are all blocked, and they aren't commercialized (well, sure, they are, but not the content on them). I wouldn't be surprised if the less-commercial stuff has gone further and further into a niche of NSFW-and-we-don't-care.
And why is Unfogged doing well now? Yes, you're all very good at commenting, but I'd say another reason for it is the breadth of topics. On the front page right now there's at least three personal posts by different people about different things, one post about political comedy from an academic perspective, two about economics, one about women's issues in culture, two about science and one about the Republican primary. I'm sure some blogs here and there have variety like that (I tried to categorize Crooked Timber's front page like this and gave up; I'd say Unfogged is ahead but not by much), but I'm pretty sure that's more than most blogs have. Unfogged: come for the harrowing traumatic stories, stay for the brainteasers.
Ogged really was unusually good at community building -- I should email him and ask how much of that was purposeful, and how much was just the way he treats people spontaneously. I can pinpoint a couple of events that sucked me in here, and they were Ogged responding to me individually and telling me that I was interesting and valuable and should stick around.
Reaching all the way back to 1 - I think conservatives who enjoy Colbert are quite aware that it's satire but have enough self awareness and are comfortable enough in their skins to enjoy it. I'd enjoy a similar character that poked fun at liberals despite the fact that right wingers might also enjoy it, though in a different way. There's a tinge of nastiness to the way that leftists enjoy Colbert, something that's partly contempt and partly smug superiority. That's what makes it impossible to grasp how right wingers might enjoy him. You see something similar in right wingers perceptions of leftist self deprecating humor.
I don't think that's it, exactly. I think it comes down more to actual disagreement about how grave the sins being satirized are. If Colbert makes a joke about how we're really kind of casual about killing civilians in other countries, someone who thinks that's a serious matter perceives him as scathing. Someone who thinks that while of course civilian casualties should be minimized, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and we do the best we can, although shucks, you can always try harder, can look at the same joke and see goodnatured ribbing.
104 seems right. Often Colbert will make what I think is a devastating criticism of some conservative viewpoint, and it's hard to see how they can look past that unless they either don't understand it at all, or don't consider it that serious a flaw.
I'm trying to think of a good left counterpart to Colbert's character. They usually seem to be based around a media stereotype of liberals, or conservative criticism. Nothing a liberal would recognize.
What we'd be looking for is a right-winger mocking liberals/leftist in a way that comes off as wryly amusing to us, and harshly condemnatory to them. I'm trying to think if PJ O'Rourke has anything that fits?
I guess he'd be the place to go, as the only funny conservative.
Sort of the reverse thing happened to me with "Team America, World Police". I talked about it with a conservative friend: I'd come away from it seeing it as having a distinctly right-wing viewpoint, although taking some affectionate digs at conservative icons, while he thought it was pretty much evenhanded.
I wonder what conservatives think of David Cross' occasional appearances on Colbert as Russ Lieber.
You'd want to start by finding a liberal counterpart to O'Reilly in terms of fame and satirizability. Your best bets are Michael Moore, Sean Penn, or Bono. But liberals don't really love any of them. Still a conservative doing a Colbert-style take on Michael Moore would probably actually work. It'd be hard enough to distinguish the mockumentary from the real thing that certain lefty types would probably think the guy was actually a liberal.
Is Colbert (the actor, not the character) the nerdiest celebrity? Is there someone else in the discussion?
Colbert is actually nerdier. Hawking is a British intellectual type.
good left counterpart to Colbert's character
Not on echt-news, but I think there's something on sitcoms. The Community characters and the Arrested Development characters are unsympathetic but well-intentioned when viewed by lefties.
One of my favorite moments of nerdily breaking character was early on when he was getting hit on by Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem. He had no idea what to do.
But are they really intended as right-wing scathing, and lefties are misunderstanding by seeing affectionate mockery? I mean, I think the 'Colbert is scathing' interpretation is correct in terms of authorial intent -- I'm not seeing anything quite that clear from the other side.
Still a conservative doing a Colbert-style take on Michael Moore would probably actually work.
OK, to be fair, it wasn't really a Colbert-style take. But every conservative criticism/parody I've seen of Moore (who, as you point out, is not really loved by liberals) seems to consist mostly of "Ha! He's so fat!" Is this really the best conservatives can do with someone as overblown and mockable as Michael Moore, who goes a long way to providing his own self-parody?
The Community characters and the Arrested Development characters are unsympathetic but well-intentioned when viewed by lefties.
Eh? George, Lucille, Lindsay and Gob are well intentioned?
quite that clear from the other side.
No, of course not-- good comedy is extremely difficult, and conservatives are inept. I tried google, came up with a link to a 2009 Mike Judge cartoon, The Goode Family, which I have never seen.
119 was exactly my response. They're lovably loathsome.
Colbert is actually nerdier. Hawking is a British intellectual type.
I don't really understand the distinctions that you're drawing. Are they interesting?
Right wingers love the dominate/submit dynamic too much to resist using it in their humor, which makes enjoying it as a leftist kind of difficult. P. J. O'Rourke is occasionally funny because he's more libertarian than genuine conservative. Ann Coulter is more typical of a right wing humorist, and there's pretty much nothing she says that is funny to me.
Team America, and Parker and Stone in general, are another potential source, as they are right libertarians and occasionally funny, but the only liberals in TA that I recall were traitors or enablers, and others simply derided as pussies. I'm curious why LB's friend saw it as balanced, because the closing "pussies, assholes, and dicks" speech seemed like a fairly good example of how conservatives view and justify their foreign policy.
Lindsay pays lip-service to environmentalism, recognizes it as an ideology. George is apolitical. Granted Lucille. Their stunted characters are the product not just of personal failings but also of the vacuous society that spawned them.
Maybe Weeds is a critique in the same way-- I see it as just on the boundary between a soap opera that has affection for the culture it depicts, partly because I was a stoned teenager and have a soft spot for potheads, but when I watch it as a foreigner it seems savage.
If Colbert has bipartisan appeal, I'll bet it's partly because of a tradition he continues from Stewart: satirizing the media.
Stewart points out very frequently that while he makes some jokes at the expense of politicians, his main target is the modern mainstream media and how they're vapid and sensationalist and sloppy and disingenuous about bias and so on. The media usually seems willfully obtuse about that. But I can imagine that a hypothetical reasonable conservative might agree with and appreciate Stewart's and Colbert's jokes about the media, even if such a person wouldn't agree with their personal politics.
Stewart doesn't have bipartisan appeal, though.
I think conservatives could view Tina Fey's character on 30 Rock as a liberal Colbert. She's supposed to be a feminist, but she always needs Jack to get her out of scrapes! She says she values diversity, but she's awkward with the black characters! Etc.
(I might be way off base here, because I've seen probably only about 10 episodes of 30 Rock. But it seemed to me that a lot of the humor was based on this type of hypocrisy on Liz's part.)
That might be, I've occasionally thought of what they do with Liz's character as unfairly mean on the vaguely-political issues.
128 in theory, but in practice, conservatives hate 30 rock, I think. Possibly because of the NYC vibe.
Lindsay pays lip-service to environmentalism, recognizes it as an ideology. George is apolitical. Granted Lucille. Their stunted characters are the product not just of personal failings but also of the vacuous society that spawned them.
Being apolitical doesn't make George well-intentioned. He's a con-man and a knowingly terrible father. As for Lindsay's environmentalism, well: "You know, we're not the only ones destroying trees. What about beavers? You call yourself an environmentalist, why don't you go club a few beavers?" I mean, in what world is Lindsay well intentioned? She's utterly selfish, vain and profligate, and all her activism is for her benefit, not for the causes.
Yeah, for some reason Britta on Community doesn't bother me as much as Liz on 30 Rock.
Britta's clumsy liberalism doesn't bother me, but wow is her character is incredibly annoying.
67 is very nice, AWB.
Juvenal does a lot of cranky old guy pissed at the world. Did you think that the satire against women was supposed to make the reader sympathize with the objects of his anger against J?
132. Her boobs are more symmetric is where that's coming from.
A Colbert-style satire of Moore would not be that different from the actual Moore. Part of Colbert's appeal is that conservative talk shows are kinda funny and entertaining if you can get past the evil. Limbaugh is actually funny in similar ways except that he ostensibly believes it.
131. For the purposes of satire, it is the character's own self-deceptions which matter rather than our superior understanding of them as failed beings.
George's being apolitical matters in a discussion about political humor; I can see claiming that AD doesn't belong in such a discussion. But myself I think it does because the critique of a failed culture is the show's foundation IMO, in common with much tolerably intelligent TV.
I mean nerdy in the cultural sense. I'm not even sure they really exist in England, but you stereotypical Oxbridge prof is definitely not nerdy.
George's being apolitical matters in a discussion about political humor
Sure, but it doesn't make him well-intentioned from a lefty's point of view. And I'm not sure Lindsay is particularly self-deceptive about her causes. Maybe a tiny fraction of the time, but she's pretty openly cynical and/or uncaring about the causes most of the time.
137: Oh good lord, do nerds exist in England. I think they may have invented nerddom, really.
I thought in England you called them 'anoraks'.
Of course they do: the English invented prototypically nerdish pastimes like trainspotting and stamp collecting. (George V, King-Emperor and nerd.)
And model-building seems to be much more popular as well.
Certainly England produces lots of nerdy cultural products (Fouglas Adams, Dr. Who, etc.) but my impression was that these are mainstream and that there's not the same identity issues which are specific to American high schools.
I could be totally wrong about the above, but either way I see no evidence at all that Hawking is nerdy.
MC Hawking on the other hand, that's nerdy.
but my impression was that these are mainstream and that there's not the same identity issues which are specific to American high schools.
I think you're saying that being British is itself so nerdy that they don't get beat up in high school like they do here?
Certainly England produces lots of nerdy cultural products (Fouglas Adams, Dr. Who, etc.) but my impression was that these are mainstream and that there's not the same identity issues which are specific to American high schools.
I suspect it's not as extreme, given that the nerd/jock dichotomy would be more pronounced in a sport-centric culture like the US. But it certainly does exist. And as for mainstream, kind of. Dr Who is a family show. Watching it as an adult, without kids, is considered a bit nerdy. But lots of people (myself included, of course) do. I mean, this is a world in which the biggest selling novels and films are about a school for wizards. Nerdy and mainstream aren't exactly mutually exclusive any more.
Here's Hawking's wedding photo from 1965.
If he had won his bet on whether Cygnus X-1 was a black hole, he would have won a four year subscription to Private Eye. How nerdy is Private Eye?
it was a common theme that the golden years of blogging, 2002-2004, were long gone and I'd missed them entirely, too bad so sad.
Yup, the legendary days of yore when Glenn Reynolds was sane and made appearances here. I also wasn't around for them, and partially bought into the idea that I'd missed a golden age.
AWB's post is from 2006. I don't feel that I missed much by not being around from 2002-late 2004.
For me, the pain of missing pre-2005 is more than outweighed by the relief that I wasn't blogging my pre-therapy angst for the world to see. Those notebooks are mine, and easily destroyed.
How nerdy is Private Eye?
In 1965 it was about as cool as you could get.
by the relief that I wasn't blogging my pre-therapy angst for the world to see
Sigh.
The golden years of blogging, 2002-2004 . . . the legendary days of yore when Glenn Reynolds was sane
Somewhat shockingly to me, I was around then, although only in the form of a lurker. I was an early adopter of some computery nerd thing, can you believe it! I stumbled onto blogs in the summer of 2002 when I found DeLong's site. Reading that, I was like, "wow, this super smart dude is writing things every day in easy to read format that allows me to waste time! awesome!" And then I started clicking on the links, and was like "whoa even apparently sane people are taking this ranting fool Lileks seriously? And why is everyone on the internet a right wing libertarian wack job?" I remember when liberal blogs started to emerge they felt like some kind of embattled minority group.
Is Colbert (the actor, not the character) the nerdiest celebrity? Is there someone else in the discussion?
Asia Carrera?
I stumbled onto blogs in the summer of 2002 when I found DeLong's site. Reading that, I was like, "wow, this super smart dude is writing things every day in easy to read format that allows me to waste time! awesome!" And then I started clicking on the links, and was like "whoa even apparently sane people are taking this ranting fool Lileks seriously? And why is everyone on the internet a right wing libertarian wack job?" I remember when liberal blogs started to emerge they felt like some kind of embattled minority group.
I was pretty similar on timing, although the first blog I stumbled onto was Professor Bainbridge, who says sensible things occassionally but mostly not, and who I haven't read in years, but it was interesting enough at the time to keep my reading for a while. And he linked to Drum fairly frequently, who I started reading shortly thereafter. And I think a distrubingly large percentage of the total number blogs I've read to this day came from Drum links--that includes this place, CT, Klein, Yglesias*, MR, Chait*, Salmon, etc., as well as some ugly early experiences with McMegan, Goldberg, etc.
*Recently stopped reading only because they moved and I'm too lazy to update my feeds.
I had a personalish livejournal in the early 00s that was dire and I hope is gone forever, then a real-name blog from '02-05 or so that I really hope no one here read. Yeesh.
152, 156 -- If you read MetaFilter (or Memepool or Kuro5hin) around that time, there were always people who got hella irritated at the "Instapundit invented blogging!!" stories. People like Jason Kottke or Lilly "Girlhacker" Tao or Justin Hall, let alone Jorn Barger, didn't match up with the stories that people wanted to write about warbloggers, and people who discovered the medium, such as it is, through warbloggers didn't know there was any sort of past. (Though Willi/am Qui/ck always seemed irritated that the term "blogsophere" was coined as an intentionally awful term by the late Brad Graham.)
128 and following: I was totally going to mention 30 Rock, We've watched every episode up through the first few of this year, and there's a really consistent skewering of Liz as the kind of well-meaning liberal that conservatives utterly despise. Some of that is fine, sometimes it takes me out of the humor (it's one thing to have unexamined racial/racist assumptions, it's another thing actually to have racist gut reactions to things that are supposed to be somehow OK; I don't think I'm quite capturing the distinction). One reason liberals are OK with it is that Tina Fey is, in fact, a feminist*, and so the skewering is taken as self-deprecating, not attacking. It's the old "only Jews get to tell Jewish jokes" thing, but with politics.
Also, of course, it's well-written as hell.
* according to a (liberal) friend who knew her at UVA, she was at the time the very embodiment of humorless feminist
I haven't watched enough of 30 Rock to know how accurate this is, but this Tiger Beatdown article on Liz Lemon seems relevant.
(Sorry for all the links lately. I've had a lot more spare time to read articles.)
160 is excellent. My 2 main responses - and they're not critiques, and I'm not arguing with the thrust of Sady's piece - is that A. Tina Fey is clearly writing in large part from who she was - a drama geek who never dated in high school or college, and B. some chunk of the show's structural flaws wrt feminism/Lemonism simply comes from sitcom standards - the show's characters diagram very clearly*, and it's not obvious how an additional character type (e.g., a woman peer/pal for Liz) would fit in. And honestly, Jenna's transition from Liz's old pal to just another actor headache I think is a pretty literal translation of Tina Fey's feelings about actors in general - does anyone who actually performs in TGS come off as a decent human being? Maybe whatshisface, the Canadian guy.
Incidentally, her book should only be listened to, as her reading of it is a very good performance, and her description of her old-fashioned Republican father, whom she obviously worships, explains a lot about Liz Lemonism. In a lot of ways, Jack is a Mary Sue for Liz's dad - infinitely competent, regimented, usually right, and utterly dismissive of silly liberals.
* male & female leads, each with a series of guest star relationships; male & female supporting actors, each with obvious flaws/foibles; 2 weird assistants; a Greek chorus (if you will) of show writers.
Every time I read something by Sady, I want to blogmarry her. Way to go Tavi for snagging her for Rookie.
I went to a Colbert taping, and he answers questions out of character before the show. I asked if there was anything he started saying as Colbert-the-character that he had come to believe as Colber-the-person, which he coyly deflected. He said he'd heard that liberal viewers assumed he was a liberal pretending to be a conservative, while many conservative viewers assumed he was a conservative pretending to be a liberal pretending to be a conservative. He said he was just happy they both were watching.
Way to go Tavi for snagging her for Rookie.
This reads like gibberish to me. I don't know what Tavi or Rookie are, and so "snagging" even looks like nonsense to me.
My own foible, obvs.
How did you get tickets? I'd really like to see Colbert, but we haven't been able to figure out how. (Did see the Daily Show recently, which was fun.)
163: AFAICT, he genuinely is more conservative than Stewart, but it's very much the old-fashioned kind of Main Street conservatism - everyone should work hard, you keep your head down, nuclear families are great, etc. For various, obvious reasons, it comes without the reactionary baggage, and of course current GOPers are so far out there that Thomas Dewey could pretty much run a satirical TV show mocking them.
Maybe he's a Kevin Drum liberal, if you will.
I forget what site linked to it but the first post I read here was the "how many 5-year-olds" one. The general trajectory was Usenet - Making Light - other blogosphere including Crooked Timber. (usenet at least immunised me to the over representation of right-libertarians on the internet.)
He's a liberal Catholic, and has more deeply held liberal political views than Stewart. Stewart is socially liberal, of course, but seems to respect the opinions of anyone who talks in measured tones.
164: Tavi = Tavi Gevinson, who had a well known style blog at a preposterously young age and who adores Sassy magazine
Rookie = Tavi's recently started web magazine. I'm way older than the target audience for it, but as someone who adored Sassy as a pre-teen, I was interested in how a project explicitly inspired by it would pan out.
The thing about the pre-warblogger blogs was that they were so uninteresting. Before politics blogs, I had "blogs" in the same category of inexplicable nerd phenomena as "LARPing" in my mind.
165 - A co-worker had tickets. I think there's a mailing list or a twitter feed that says when they're available? I know I got Daily Show tickets but didn't get into the screening - my understanding if Colbert is easier to get into (because it's less famous internationally?).
An interesting Colbert character break was when he was interviewing Harry Belafonte and said that he was at the march on washington in utero. Which must have been the person not the character. Going to civil rights marches in the 60s is not much in keeping with modern conservatism.
166 and 168 both sound plausible to me. Though part of the difference with Stewart is that Colbert is much smarter than Stewart. Stewart gets past what he can understand in politics pretty quickly.
165 - A co-worker had tickets. I think there's a mailing list or a twitter feed that says when they're available? I know I got Daily Show tickets but didn't get into the screening - my understanding if Colbert is easier to get into (because it's less famous internationally?).
Also: go! It was great.
160: Do not understand the appeal of Sady Doyle.
171: We're supposed to be on that mailing list but have never heard anything. Maybe I'll look into it again, my impression was that he was more sold out than Stewart. Though the Daily Show is a bit weird as they sell more tickets than seats so you have to show up early to guarantee your spot.
My sister has been to the Colbert show twice, but she lives in NYC, so can go whenever the tickets are available.
Sassy as a pre-teen
Blume is not allowed on my lawn.
I live in New York! But they've never emailed us to say that they're available.
Blume is not allowed on my lawn.
Frowny face! Does it help if I say that I had never heard of any of the things they talked about in the magazine (Rocky Horror Picture Show? Ian Svenonius? John Fluevogs?) and thought their style tips were insane? Yet I kept reading.
A friend's little brother was a . . . what was it called? "Cute Boy with Zine!" or whatever. Then he grew up and wrote for . . . Jane!
Do not understand the appeal of Sady Doyle.
Well, I liked the hell out of this one, and I have never seen an episode of 30 Rock. Possibly because it wasn't about dudes?
172: Though part of the difference with Stewart is that Colbert is much smarter than Stewart.
I had to look at this a few times, and am still not convinced, though I certainly see reasons to believe it. I've heard both of them in fairly lengthy radio interviews (hour-ish long), and the most notable difference between them was that Stewart repeatedly reverted to the funny charmer that he perhaps fundamentally is, while Colbert was all business.
Since this thread is languishing, I'll say very quietly that I kind of can't stand 30 Rock.
I know one of Colbert's brothers a bit. He is one of the smarter people I know.
What Colbert does is very hard and requires being really quick and having a broad range of knowledge. It's like how really good improv requires being very very smart.
Just compare what they do in interviews, Colbert is consistently brilliant while Stewart is charming but out of his depth when he has smart guests.
183: Do you have a list like you did with obnoxious colleges and overrated animals?
Also really smart: Al Franken. I love that guy.
Oh man, I miss having Franken as my senator. I think I sent him at least two love letters (as compared to Klobuchar, whom I sent some strongly worded e-mails regarding Wellstone's legacy, and her apparent unwillingness to honor it).
Got Colbert tickets. Their "we'll email you when tickets are available" link is completely useless, but if you just leave the website up and refresh it a few times a day it doesn't seem to be that hard to get tickets. They just posted all the tickets for the last week of January/first week of February. They also had one next-day ticket that popped up yesterday.