FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2025:
In the meantime, Lewis in Saudi: We don't expect to be posting until mid-afternoon. On this, the third Friday in the cycle, it's just another medical Monday!
In the meantime, this:
We're fortunate that we get to read Helen Lewis because we subscribe to The Atlantic. In her most recent essay, Lewis was off in Saudi at the recent comedy festival there.
The highlighted comment posted below brought us right out of our chairs. Leis is commenting on one of the curiosities of the so-called "democratization of media"—the democratization under which our society's most basic functioning finds itself under attack:
I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia
[...]Louis C.K. was once the titan of thoughtful American comedy—evidence of a strange recent trend of treating comics as public intellectuals, even philosopher kings, rather than entertainers whose success is measured in laughs per minute. He had a sitcom, Louie, that was loosely based on his life, and he had the admiration and envy of his peers. Then, in 2017, The New York Times published one of the most consequential stories of the #MeToo era...
Lewis continues from there. But what a long, strange "recent trend" it has been, in which the spread of platforms like "cable news," talk radio and podcasts have created a world in which we the people look to a bunch of stand-up comedians as the preferred source of insight and wisdom.
We thought the New York Times had made a mistake when it began treating stand-up comedians as "artists." However many years later, we now have the daily spectacle of such Fox News Channel programs as The Five and Gutfeld!, with some of the least-informed people on the planet messaging one of our two major tribes.
There's much more to say about the role of comedy (and of comedy's various beards and "stylings") in the creation of our failing nation's current intellectual squalor. For right now, we'll leave it right here, with Lewis getting it right.
ReplyDeleteThe New York Times had made a mistake turning into the biggest bullshit generator in both human and shape-shifting reptiloid histories.
All their other mistakes are nothing, compared to this one.
Republicans are incapable of governing: Day 17
Delete7:31,
DeleteSqueal louder, snowflake.
Stand-up comedians, unlike the corporate-owned, Right-wing media (AKA the MSM) aren't being paid to whitewash the perfidy of the Republican Party.
ReplyDeleteTrump tripled the federal deficit in 10 months.
ReplyDeleteThank you Mr. President.