Man, I hope I'm the first person who made that joke. It's one of those ready-made jokes that's just out there. I can't believe Leno or Letterman — Leno and Letterman — haven't already made it, but let it be known, I arrived at it independently.
While preachers preach of evil fates Teachers teach that knowledge waits Can lead to hundred-dollar plates Goodness hides behind its gates But even the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States Sometimes must have to stand naked.
Picture them naked. It's a great old technique for cutting the people who intimidate you down to size. It's fun too. And funny. And completely legal. At least until that day when your thought-dreams can be seen...
ADDED: Non-random excerpt from David Foster Wallace's brilliant essay about the porn industry ("Big Red Son", republished in "Consider the Lobster"):
A slight surprise is that a lot of the industry’s elite woodmen are short—5'6", 5'7"—and most of their companions tower over them. Dick Filth confirms that the contemporary industry’s 5'6" standard helps a prodigious male organ look even more prodigious on videotape, a medium that apparently does all kinds of strange things to perspective.
Why should we mind if the TV star has an apartment in the building to retreat to before and after the show? He has to commute into town. He has to be fresh and energetic to do the show, which depends largely on his performance. He should be able to easily get away from the workplace to nap, watch TV, eat, and, yes, have sex.
An ex-"Late Show" intern unmasked herself Saturday as one of David Letterman's former flings - and sources revealed the randy funnyman keeps a bachelor pad atop the Ed Sullivan Theater.
"I was madly in love with him at the time," said Holly Hester. "I would have married him. He was hilarious."...
[There was a] year-long, secret romance... she said, until the funnyman called it off because of their age difference.
Outside what is believed to be Hester's country home in Sebastopol, Calif. - in ritzy Sonoma County - a middle-aged man lashed out at a Daily News reporter last night. "Get the f--- out of here. We're being offered a lot of money for this s---," he said.
Ha ha. I love that quote. Get the fuck out of here. We're being offered a lot of money for this shit. Reporters! Trying to get the story for free!
An ex-"Late Show" staffer said Letterman kept a room insiders dubbed "the bunker" that was open only to his favorite young female underlings....
A woman identified as a former paramour, Stephanie Birkitt, 34, remained in hiding Saturday. She was, until recently, dating Joe Halderman, who was arrested Thursday for allegedly threatening to go public with Letterman's dalliances unless he was paid $2 million.
A "Late Show" office worker in 1997, Birkitt quickly developed a role as Letterman's Girl Friday. She went on to appear in several skits as his comic foil. Behind the scenes, their relationship became intimate, sources said.
"The creepy relationship that Letterman maintained with Stephanie was obvious and not normal," an insider said. "She was able to do anything and everything ... It was pretty well known that Stephanie was the one that Letterman was having fun with."
And there you see why we speak of "sexual harassment" even when the employee getting the sex is eager to receive it. It hurts the rest of the employees. It skews the work assignments in a way that feels unfair.
But perhaps an exception should be made for a great late night talk show host. The funnyman's mood and ego need boosting. Just as he must have an office full of people who can write jokes and comic routines — who must share a lot of not-that-businesslike comraderie — he needs pretty ladies to keep his senses well-honed. It's part of the structure of a business that revolves around a performer. The funnyman needs his supply of sex, and the paying career positions on the staff can be used to create a pool of potential sexual partners who will keep the old man bolstered up.
Perhaps, I said. Perhaps. Please discuss. And take into account the other examples we've seen lately of great men to whom the rules arguably do not apply: Roman Polanski (movie director might be allowed to rape), Harvard students (elite collegians might be allowed to stalk), Richard Prince (important artist might be allowed to display child pornography), Brian David Mitchell (man of God might be allowed to rape). And not so recently: Bill Clinton (Presidents of the United States might be allowed to have sex with subordinate employees).
Letterman has to admit it, because he needed to testify about an attempt to blackmail him over his secret sexual affairs with women who have worked with him. D'oh! And now it is revealed. How does that undermine his sweet, inept, self-mocking lecher he's been on the show all these years.
Here's video of the confession he did on the show last night. "I had to tell them how I was disturbed by this I was worried for myself, I was worried for my family, I felt menaced by this, and I had to tell them all of the creepy things that I have done that were going to be exposed. [Laughter.] Now why is that funny?"
He did a good job of damage control, I think. He made it sound as if it was just sex — which implies that you're a prude if you don't give him a pass. But sex with the women who work on his staff? This is the atmosphere of sexual harassment. What are the details that made the blackmailer think he could extort $2 million? Did some women get jobs and promotions because they were sexually available while men and other women lost out?
***
Meanwhile, here he is with Madonna, in a cute bit where they go out for a slice of pizza in the Italian restaurant next door to the theater. Madonna, it turns out, has never had New York pizza-by-the-slice and she's quite fussy about cheese... and not fussy at all about touching hands all down the aisle of the theater and in the crowd outside and then eating with her hands. What a dame!
Earlier in the show, Madonna talked about her famous 1994 appearance and attributes her strange behavior to marijuana smoking. I'm not sure if that counts as promoting marijuana or warning against it, but it bothered me to hear the icon admit to doing it (even 15 years ago).
"Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve....
"Letterman certainly has the right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction. And this is all thanks to our U.S. military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's right to free speech — in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect."
LOL. I love the way our U.S. military women and men horned in on the big foofaraw.
By the way, it's disrespect that needs to be protected by rights. If what you want is wall-to-wall respectful discourse, fuck rights.
(Photoshop request: Unevolved Letterman — merge a photo of the lecherous geezer talk-show host with the face of an ape or caveman.)
"The Palins have no intention of providing a ratings boost for David Letterman by appearing on his show. Plus, it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman," PalinPAC spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton said Wednesday.
So Letterman is a child abuser for making a tasteless joke?
Sullivan seems to miss that Stapleton just made a child-rape joke. It's a joke! Well, it's a joke is not an apt excuse — is it? — when the joke is supposed to work based on a shared belief about the butt of it.
Stapleton's joke depends on seeing Letterman as someone who's enthused about the rape of children — or at least the children of politicians we don't like. By the same token, Letterman's joke worked to the extent that the audience shares the belief that Palin's daughter is a big slut.
Neither joke is any damned good. Letterman is a creep for making a girl the butt of his joke, and Stapleton is an idiot for trying to show that she can joke too and cranking out another dose of child-rape humor.
But the surrealism and narcissism of the Wasilla nutcase is what stands out:
"First, remember in the campaign, Barack Obama said, 'Family's off limits. You don't talk about my family.' "And the candidate who must be obeyed, everybody adhered to that and they did leave his family alone. They haven't done that on the other side of the ticket and it has continued to this day so that's a political double standard."
So brandishing a special needs infant as a campaign prop was putting your family off-limits? Pushing your own daughter into the klieglights to divert attention from your own fantastic lies is family-protective? Pushing Bristol Palin into an absurd abstinence campaign to gin up support from the Christianist right is looking after your kids? Palin reaps what she sows. And she clings to any whisp of victimhood like the attention-starved celebreality star she really is.
Now, this is absurd. Nearly all politicians display their families. Do they brandish them? Brandish means to shake or wave (as a weapon) menacingly/to exhibit in an ostentatious or aggressive manner. Occasionally, one reads of some criminal swinging a baby around like a cudgel, but with politicians, the displaying of the family is non-aggressive and without any weapon connotations. Obama displayed and continues to display Sasha and Malia in the conventional political way, and I'm sure Sullivan would be steamed if anyone mocked them or said anything sexual about them.
Bristol Palin's abstinence effort seems pretty silly to me too, but there's no reason to view that as opening her up to all sorts of vicious mockery. She found herself in an awfully uncomfortable spot. It's embarrassing enough for a teenager to become pregnant by accident, but to endure this in the crossfire of a political campaign had to be excruciating. But she put up with it somehow, didn't take the out of abortion, kept smiling, and tried to turn herself into a good lesson for others. How is this sowing something that she deserves to reap?
Or — oh — it's Palin who reaps what she sows. Is the girl not a person worthy of any regard? What did the girl do? "Family's off limits. You don't talk about my family." Obama said that. It was intended to bind his harshest opponents to a standard of behavior. Sullivan offers absolutely no reason why the same principle does not protect Palin's family.
And why should the governor of a state be called an "attention-starved celebreality star"? Is it because you don't respect her as a politician? You might call everyone with the nerve to run for President/Vice President an attention-starved celebreality star, but the fact is you don't. Apparently, it's because she's got kids who do things that you think we can sit back and view as objects of idle amusement. If anyone is to be a politician — in your nasty little world — their kids better toe the line and stay perfectly prim and healthy and smart (or hide).
Great. Feminism properly stands separate from Democratic and Republican politics. NOW notes that at the end of the Letterman shaming:
[I]'s important to note that when Chelsea Clinton was 13 years old she was the target of numerous insults based on her appearance. Rush Limbaugh even referred to her as the "White House dog." NOW hopes that all the conservatives who are fired up about sexism in the media lately will join us in calling out sexism when it is directed at women who aren't professed conservatives.
So NOW is setting an example. Let's hope they keep it up too.
According to Drudge — "developing" — Palin has responded by calling Letterman "pathetic."
I thought it was good-natured fun, and the audience was surprisingly sympathetic to Palin. (Am I reading the "oohs" accurately? They might have been sympathetic to rats... and slutty stewardesses.)
If he's not mocking the mocking, he looks anti-Hispanic, and I'm pretty sure his show is careful about avoiding the appearance of bigotry. Brian Beutler opines:
The campaign against Second-Circuit Court of Appeals Judge (and potential SCOTUS nominee) Sonia Sotomayor began in earnest when nameless former clerks on that court told The New Republic's legal correspondent Jeffrey Rosen that the Hispanic judge (and one-time George H.W Bush appointee) is too temperamental--and not intelligent enough--to serve on the Court....
The charges have been challenged loudly--almost immediately after the article came out, other people familiar with her work came forward to call the piece baseless. But once the cat was out of the bag, there was no stuffing it back in....
[T]he coup de grâce may have come last night when Sotomayor bashing traveled outside the beltway, and on to the Late Show...
Beutler notes the speculation that Rosen was trying to help his brother-in-law — go to the link for the details — and procures a denial from Rosen.
Here I am on May 4th wondering whether Rosen had ulterior motives:
On Friday, Letterman brought in comedian Bill Hicks's mother to apologize to her personally for having, in 1993, cut what would have been Hicks's final appearance (his 12th) on the talk show.
Hicks died several months later of pancreatic cancer....
When Hicks was performing in the early 1990s, freedom of speech, among the pundits and the public, was under constant attack....
Hicks, who knew he was dying of cancer at the time, was heartbroken, as was his family, though he blamed the USA, “The United States of Advertisers.”
So Letterman making up with Mary Hicks now was both poignant and depressing, and this mood was palpably felt: The sketch did not get big laughs....
At the end of that, we see Letterman groveling before Hicks's mother. "What was the matter with me?... It says more about me as a guy than it says about me Bill, because there was absolutely nothing wrong with that." Yes, but there was something wrong with it. It encourages the assassination of specific celebrities (particularly Billy Ray Cyrus). There's other material that could be viewed as homophobic and it is hateful toward pro-lifers and mildly blasphemous about Jesus, but I think the real problem was the creepy encouragement of violence (quite aside from whether it might actually have inspired murder).
Is there some reason why Letterman is now making his amends? If the pain he caused Hicks and his mom is something that gnawed at him all these years, why do something about it now? Does Letterman or someone he loves have cancer? Or does Letterman suddenly have a newfound hate for Billy Ray Cyrus?
IN THE COMMENTS: Diamondhead said:
Bill Hicks was "heartbroken" because the full sting of his comedy wasn't felt by his intended targets? That's funnier than anything in his routine.
