Me love Simpsons writers' fixation on Steve Allen, and "if this is anyone but Steve Allen you're stealing my bit" might be best-written joke in entire history of show.
I think it's some sort of comedy Inception that one of Steve Allen's most notable bits (from back when he used to actually do comedy) was reading made-up "letters to the editor" from indignant morons waxing hyperbolic about something mundane or pointless...and then he BECAME one of those people who wrote such letters unironically.
Reading this from Steve Allen reminds me of listening to John Cleese these days, and realizing that he was BECOME the very stiff, humorless person he became famous for making fun of.
I love Mystery Science Theater 3000's Steve-O-Meter, the device that can tell you if something has already been thought of by Steve Allen. (Spoiler alert: Everything has, including the Steve-O-Meter.)
And the "inefficient writing" thing gave me a nasty flashback to my small-town newspapering days, when we ran a weekly column that...well, here's an actual excerpt: "Several years ago, prior to graduation of a large private school, a young lady was kicked out of school for drug use, three months before she was to graduate. The reason was because this school has a 'Zero-Tolerance' drug policy and this student violated it. You may say that this was cruel. Well, it was, especially for the student who got kicked out of school. However, she knew the policy, as did all the rest of the students. As we all know, word has a way of getting around very quickly and the remaining members of the graduating class, as well as all future students, understand that their actions and behavior do have consequences."
There's always something to complain about, if you're crotchety enough. If you ask me, entertainment has gotten measurably better and less sordid on the whole than it was when this was written, for both good reasons (improved taste levels) and bad (victorious moral guardians increasing censorship.) By this I mean that the Jerry Springers and Howard Sterns that were so prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s have fallen out of favour -- although that also means the rise of much more anodyne forms of entertainment, mostly on YouTube and streaming channels
Of course the Steve Allens throughout history would blow a cow at something like "W.A.P." no matted what, since, shock and horror, it's designed to provoke exactly that response.
Oh, Steve Allen was trying.... He was very VERY trying!
He's the Rich, Out-of-Touch Ivory-Tower Libburul that Fox News loves to attack—who, until I met a few with my former wife in Boston, I would've sworn were strawmen invented by Bill O'Reilly! Sadly, no—these people are as real as a heart attack, and Steve Allen is a god to them....
He did. He was a weird guy to be a walking punchline because those folks are generally tacky and dumb, like, I dunno, Carrot Top and Pauly Shore, whereas Allen's whole brand was being classy and smart. He was like a proto-Dick Cavett.
Kanye certainly wouldn't find anything morally wrong about the Holocaust. Thankfully he's only (checks notes) the seventh most important and influential pop star of the past fifty years.
Sadly for the world, Americans have been equivocating about the Holocaust since the 1950s. For much of that time, the *public* equivocators were generally right-wing figures. Many virulently denounced fascist attacks on democracy while downplaying the organized murder of Jews (and other groups painted as "subhuman"). I suppose it struck them that way because Judaism had often been conflated with socialism, the right's scary monster both before and after the fascists' heyday.
Today, I think few people across the political spectrum think deeply when they equivocate on the subject. I see right-wingers on social media using it as a base for raw-numbers comparison of lives taken by fascism vs. Soviet and Chinese socialism, as if the actions of an authoritarian or totalitarian state can be morally mitigated by its (supposed) political philosophy. On the left, where antisemitism has become more visible in recent years, the issue appears to have its badis in rejection of Israel and zionism. To me, that's badly misdirected but very slightly more understandable.
I have personal theories about the origins of antisemitic thought, but they aren't well-formed, so I won't make this any longer than it has grown.
Me love Simpsons writers' fixation on Steve Allen, and "if this is anyone but Steve Allen you're stealing my bit" might be best-written joke in entire history of show.
I think it's some sort of comedy Inception that one of Steve Allen's most notable bits (from back when he used to actually do comedy) was reading made-up "letters to the editor" from indignant morons waxing hyperbolic about something mundane or pointless...and then he BECAME one of those people who wrote such letters unironically.
Reading this from Steve Allen reminds me of listening to John Cleese these days, and realizing that he was BECOME the very stiff, humorless person he became famous for making fun of.
I love Mystery Science Theater 3000's Steve-O-Meter, the device that can tell you if something has already been thought of by Steve Allen. (Spoiler alert: Everything has, including the Steve-O-Meter.)
And the "inefficient writing" thing gave me a nasty flashback to my small-town newspapering days, when we ran a weekly column that...well, here's an actual excerpt: "Several years ago, prior to graduation of a large private school, a young lady was kicked out of school for drug use, three months before she was to graduate. The reason was because this school has a 'Zero-Tolerance' drug policy and this student violated it. You may say that this was cruel. Well, it was, especially for the student who got kicked out of school. However, she knew the policy, as did all the rest of the students. As we all know, word has a way of getting around very quickly and the remaining members of the graduating class, as well as all future students, understand that their actions and behavior do have consequences."
Somebody who didn't have much to say, but had to come up with 1,200 words to say it in?
As crotchety as he was, as out-of-touch his style is: the old man shouting at the cloud is fundamentally right.
There's always something to complain about, if you're crotchety enough. If you ask me, entertainment has gotten measurably better and less sordid on the whole than it was when this was written, for both good reasons (improved taste levels) and bad (victorious moral guardians increasing censorship.) By this I mean that the Jerry Springers and Howard Sterns that were so prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s have fallen out of favour -- although that also means the rise of much more anodyne forms of entertainment, mostly on YouTube and streaming channels
Of course the Steve Allens throughout history would blow a cow at something like "W.A.P." no matted what, since, shock and horror, it's designed to provoke exactly that response.
Oh, Steve Allen was trying.... He was very VERY trying!
He's the Rich, Out-of-Touch Ivory-Tower Libburul that Fox News loves to attack—who, until I met a few with my former wife in Boston, I would've sworn were strawmen invented by Bill O'Reilly! Sadly, no—these people are as real as a heart attack, and Steve Allen is a god to them....
He also appeared on an episode of The Critic
He did. He was a weird guy to be a walking punchline because those folks are generally tacky and dumb, like, I dunno, Carrot Top and Pauly Shore, whereas Allen's whole brand was being classy and smart. He was like a proto-Dick Cavett.
He wasn't wrong about equivocating about the Holocaust. He was just early.
Kanye certainly wouldn't find anything morally wrong about the Holocaust. Thankfully he's only (checks notes) the seventh most important and influential pop star of the past fifty years.
wow, the irony(?) of posting this yesterday.
Sadly for the world, Americans have been equivocating about the Holocaust since the 1950s. For much of that time, the *public* equivocators were generally right-wing figures. Many virulently denounced fascist attacks on democracy while downplaying the organized murder of Jews (and other groups painted as "subhuman"). I suppose it struck them that way because Judaism had often been conflated with socialism, the right's scary monster both before and after the fascists' heyday.
Today, I think few people across the political spectrum think deeply when they equivocate on the subject. I see right-wingers on social media using it as a base for raw-numbers comparison of lives taken by fascism vs. Soviet and Chinese socialism, as if the actions of an authoritarian or totalitarian state can be morally mitigated by its (supposed) political philosophy. On the left, where antisemitism has become more visible in recent years, the issue appears to have its badis in rejection of Israel and zionism. To me, that's badly misdirected but very slightly more understandable.
I have personal theories about the origins of antisemitic thought, but they aren't well-formed, so I won't make this any longer than it has grown.
Thank you for your opinion, whoever you are.
Next?