Tuesday May 08, 2012

CULTURE WAR FOR DUMMIES. As a sensible person might have guessed, Jim Downey, the guy who wrote the unused Saturday Night Live sketch about Obama and Bin Laden, denies there was anything political about its absence from last weekend's show. Of course there is always something political going on behind the scenes at a professional entertainment concern, but the politics are usually that of the show's often constitutionally insecure workers (as hundreds of sour SNL reminiscences demonstrate), and not the tedious sort that usually concerns us here. Who knows who's trying to screw whom over there, and on what basis? But it probably isn't foreign policy.

Nonetheless as I mentioned yesterday the exclusion became a Thing among rightbloggers, who seldom sputter more than when the subject is, even just ostensibly, culture, pop or otherwise. E.g.: "Good politically-oriented comedy usually has an element of courage. It's not blind in the left eye with microscopic vision in the right," lectures some guy at Ace Of Spades, quoting Bergson, I think.

National Review even brought in Wall Street Journal comedy legend John Fund, who explained to readers, in his famously winsome style, that the "censored script" was in point of fact and on the merits a laff riot, and called for collective action against the unfair practices at SNL:

I’ve never met Jim Downey, the author of the scrapped script, but I can only hope people who believe in equal-opportunity potshots rise to his defense.

Fund probably thinks it works like the morning news shows: Make a big enough stink that they have to make sure you have equal time, and when they do keep bitching about bias until they're afraid to ever seriously challenge you.

UPDATE. They're still at it. Some guy at Gene Lalor's blog provides a timeline of the conspiracy:

In deference to complaints by arch-racial agitator Rev. Jesse Jackson and in conformity with a concerted effort to compensate for alleged discrimination toward African-Americans in the entertainment industry, Hollywood and television producers caved and today blacks are more than well-represented on the silver and TV screens.

They bent over backwards, upside-down and every whichway to assure blacks that the entertainment industry was not only not racist but that they would slander conservatives in the process in order to prove their how liberal they were.

DailyCaller.com revealed that “SNL” has caved again, this time to advance the Obama 2012 re-election campaign.

Tim Meadows was the thin end of the wedge!