Commenter Susan pointed me to a post on So Quoted where Bill calls out those of us “infants” who didn’t get Randy Newman’s performance at Macworld:

Who knew? I dunno, maybe anyone who realizes Newman has a long, extremely well-documented career outside of Disney? Just a little hint, Jason — Short People wasn’t written about the Seven Dwarfs…

Randy Newman has an excellent way of writing in the voice of a character. Even when that character isn’t a computer animated toy. To Jason Chen and other infants like him, there’s a whole world of crazy crap that happened before 1995. Look it up. And get off my lawn.

Well yes, I was not previously aware of satirical comic stylings of one Randy Newman. Never heard that “Short People” song or anything else by Newman that wasn’t related to a film or television series. Now that I’ve been exposed to this other side of his work, I’m still not a fan.

Satire works best if you’re in on the joke. The fact that it’s taken this long for me to figure out that “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country” was a sarcastic tongue and cheek ditty meant to entertain probably means that I’m even more dim than I previously suspected. Now that I’ve had the joke explained to my infantile brain, I’m still not laughing. It’s not that I think he’s off base or that I think he was being insulting to our nation’s leaders. Far from it. The current administration disgusts me. These crazy fucks deserve every evil word spoken against them. There should probably be conspiracy and treason charges brought up against some of them. One can dream.

Satire usually isn’t balls out, bust a gut, cry your eyes out funny. No one would accuse the Capital Steps of sending audiences to the hospital laughing (I also can’t stand the Capital Steps). Political satire is usually pretty high brow to begin with. And if your views differ from those of the satirist, you probably won’t find it all that clever. Hell, even if you agree, you might not be laughing as I have found with Randy Newman. It also probably helps if you get the joke to begin with.

So no, didn’t get it. Now that I get it, still not laughing which probably means I still don’t quite get it. Ah well. Guess I’m not a fan of political satire to begin with.

Randy Newman, not such a batshit crazy fuck after all. Probably funnier for someone other than me.

Thanks for the link, Susan.

[Via So Quoted]

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Dumb Ass. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.