Even as a composite? Might it not be fake, but accurate? Performative authenticity?

Oh... MY... GOD...

So Chuck Schumer has spent his entire career telling a story about a Long Island couple...

The only thing is... THEY DONT EXIST!!!! THEY ARENT REAL pic.twitter.com/dgmWLKvqwC

— kevin smith (@kevin_smith45) August 12, 2025

It's hard to think of other examples of a politician creating characters with actual names to spice up the rhetoric. I thought of John Edwards's little girl without a coat — "a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm" — but she didn't have a name. There was the name Julia, in Barack Obama's "Life of Julia," but she wasn't presented as a real person, just a cartoon everywoman.

"It feels like you’re almost handling it badly in an impressive way at this point."

John Oliver is wondering what’s going on with Kate Middleton! #WWHL pic.twitter.com/vNAxWzj5Uc

— Watch What Happens Live! (@BravoWWHL) March 13, 2024

"The Georgia Guidestones, a 19-foot mysterious granite monument in the Peach State, was demolished on Thursday for safety reasons, after being damaged in a blast."

Newsweek reports.

The big mystery about the monument wasn't how it got there, but just who paid to buy the land and put it up. It looks a bit like Stonehenge, but it's not ancient. It went up in 1980, financed by someone who worked through a banker who was sworn to protect his anonymity. 

The stones were engraved with 10 principles (in 8 languages), and the first one is blatantly evil, once you penetrate the euphemism "Maintain":

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature

I've got 6 TikTok selections today. Let me know which ones you like.

1. Making "breakfast coffee" — from the 1950s — involves egg whites.

2. What meaning can a 3-year-old find in the song "Under the Bridge"?

3. A fly breaking up with a fly.

4. Peter Doocy saying goodbye to Jen Psaki.

5. A lesson in awful restaurant conversation.

5. What are the guys in the office getting their mother for Mother's Day? (There's a clear winner.)

6. A mother remembers.

"For Democrats, who see him exiled to Mar-a-Lago, stripped of his key social media platforms and facing determined prosecutors, his future seems risible if not pathetic."

"But this is Donald Trump, always ready to strike back harder than he has been struck, to blame anyone but himself, to silence any doubts with the sound of his own voice, to take what he believes is his and, most of all, to seize all available attention. Sound the alarm."

From "Why I’m Sure Trump Will Run for President in 2024" by Michael Wolff (NYT). The highest-rated comment over there — with over 1600 recommendations and full of typos — is: 

What else is he goingt to do? He doesnt' read. He has no interest in music, dance, movies, TV, theater, or art. He could care less about science. He doesnt' like to travel. He has no firends. He's not interested in helping people. He's not religious. He has no sense of humor. He's not loyal to any sport teams. He has no imagination, no curiosity. He craves junk food. He's the most boring person on the planet. of course, he's going to run. It's all he has left.

So many wacky propositions there! The one I find the funniest is that he can be disparaged for his lack of interest in dance. Has anyone else ever been disparaged for lack of interest in dance? In any case, we've seen him dance and he seems to love it!

 

It was a whole dance craze! On TikTok!

But the least true statement in that comment is... oh, I don't know. It's a competition between "He has no sense of humor" and "He's the most boring person on the planet."

Maybe people have to lie to themselves about how entertaining Trump is so that can resist rooting for him simply because it's so fun and funny. You know, like they did last time:

 

Yes, the "future seems risible," but which way is it risible?

ADDED: Trump danced — with a sense of humor and unboringly — on "Saturday Night Live":

Of course, when that NYT commenter faulted Trump for his lack of interest in dance, he meant dance as something that fits in set of things he listed — "music, dance, movies, TV, theater, or art." Smell the elitism. He meant ballet and the kind of modern dance that you watch with quiet awe from a cushy seat.

AND: It's absurd to say he's not interested in TV, when he starred in a TV show for 14 years.

"The question of impeachment hasn't just been employed as effective hospice care, it's become a major talking point among House Democrats..."

3 Daily Beast headlines.

1. "Michelle Wolf Compares Ivanka Trump to Herpes: ‘You Always Show Up When We’re About to Get F*cked.'"

2. "Anthony Kennedy, You Are a Total Disgrace to America." "And now we learn that on top of everything else, Kennedy may just be corrupt. So his son Justin, if last week’s New York Times account is correct, in essence kept Donald Trump in business for the better part of a decade, overseeing $1 billion worth of loans to the Trump Organization via Deutsche Bank, where he worked. Justin and the Trump kids are buddies, it seems. Justin and Trump himself are palsy-walsy."

3. "John Oliver Is Devastated Over SCOTUS: ‘Everything Is Terrible Now.'" (Oliver was a lot better than the Beast's headline makes him seem. He was mocking the Donald Trump Jr. tweet that said, "OMG! Just when you thought this week couldn't get more lit... I give you Anthony Kennedy's retirement from #SCOTUS," which clearly deserves the mockery Oliver deftly delivered: "I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with Mister Junior on this, because I don’t think this is ‘lit’ at all. I mean, it’s obvs crayAF, no one is denying that fam, but I would argue that this week’s news was neither lit nor on fleek nor was it three fire emojis. Now, granted, I’m still a little shook jsyk, but I personally believe Kennedy’s retirement is super werpt. And I’m happy to announce that in saying that, all of the slang words I just used are now officially dead forever—and that includes ‘werpt,’ a term that doesn’t even exist for which I preemptively ruined just in case.")

On a panel before the screening of "Wag the Dog," John Oliver confronts Dustin Hoffman about sexual harassment.

Several things you need to notice here:

1. "Wag the Dog" — a 20-year of political satire — was written by David Mamet and satirizes the problem of fake news as it was seen during the Bill Clinton era. A fake war (with Albania) is created to distract people from the President's sex scandal (involving an underage girl).

2. Dustin Hoffman has recently been accused of inappropriately touching a 17-year-old. The alleged touching took place more than 10 years before "Wag the Dog," during the Reagan era.

3. John Oliver has an HBO comedy show that uses the format of a real news show, so it's sort of "fake news" (except that we know what it is and the comedy often sheds light on real news stories). The selection of Oliver to moderate a panel about "Wag the Dog" seems absolutely perfect.

4. This was not an awards show or gala event honoring Hoffman or his movie. This was a discussion at the at the 92nd Street Y, where (I believe) audiences expect a serious intellectual conversation, not lightweight blather.

5. Under the circumstances, Hoffman had to know that the topic of sexual harassment was so obviously on the table that not to talk about it would feel like a coverup. He wasn't blindsided. He chose to appear. And — to his credit — he did not get up and stomp out. He didn't even raise his voice. He defended himself.

6. Oliver deserves credit for raising the subject and for not letting it go after a superficial answer. The news reports of the discussion stress how awkward it felt, but I think it's great that the "fake" newsman (Oliver) demonstrated what a real newsman ought to do with an interview. Keep going and get somewhere with the story.

7. As Deadline Hollywood tells it:

Warning it was “likely to be the tensest part of the evening,” Oliver started in with Hoffman... “You’ve made one statement in print,” Oliver said. “Does that feel like enough to you?” Hoffman replied, “First of all, it didn’t happen, the way she reported.” He said his apology over the incident, offered, he said, at the insistence of his reps, was widely misconstrued “at the click of a button.”...

“It’s that part of the response to this stuff that pisses me off,” Oliver said. “It is reflective of who you were. You’ve given no evidence to show that it didn’t happen. There was a period of time when you were creeping around women. It feels like a cop-out to say, ‘Well, this isn’t me.’ Do you understand how that feels like a dismissal?”‘

"In some ways, it’s never been easier to be a political comedian: the Trump jokes write themselves."

"In other ways, though, it’s never been harder: amid all the absurdity, the most consequential issues imaginable are at stake," writes New Yorker editor David Redneck...

Damn you, autocorrect.

That's New Yorker editor  David Remnick, writing in email pushing me to read various articles about "comedians who are helping us to understand and survive the chaos." They've got something about Samantha Bee, whose political satire is, we're told, “slash-and-burn” (which sounds like more chaos) and something about John Oliver, who, we're told, is "cable’s king of catharsis" (catharsis cures chaos?).

I'm interested in this idea that it's easy to do comedy now because "the Trump jokes write themselves," because I was just reading "SNL’s Toothless Trump Schtick Is Tired as Hell/After a record-breaking, Emmy-winning season, ‘Saturday Night Live’ is struggling to get laughs with its unimaginative Trump-bashing skits." 

That's by Matt Wilstein in The Daily Beast — published 2 days ago and thus not taking account of the Trump-bashing cold open on last night's show. Wilstein is particularly critical of comedy writing that is "barely an exaggeration of what the real Trump said during a speech a day earlier" (like when Alec Baldwin's comic Trump told the mayor of San Juan, "I don’t know if you know this, but you’re on an island in the water, the ocean water, big ocean, with fishies and bubbles and turtles that bite," after real Trump had said, "This is an island surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water").

Last summer, before Baldwin had started playing Trump, author Malcolm Gladwell used another iconic SNL impression—Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin—to denounce what he viewed as the show’s “toothless” satire problem. Like Baldwin, Fey would often just repeat what Palin had actually said for comic effect. “They want the laugh, so they make fun of the way she talks,” Gladwell said on his podcast. “But the way she talks is not the problem.” The same could be said for Baldwin’s Trump.

And that’s the same critique that John Oliver levied this week on Late Night with Seth Meyers, albeit without naming Baldwin or SNL. “It’s easy to do bad comedy, because you just need to repeat what he says,” Oliver said. “And that’s not a joke, that’s repetition. Whereas comedy, especially if you want to try to do something that’s not just happening online all the time, is an effort.”

If it's easy, you're doing it wrong. That seems to be the proposition.

What I'd say is: Those who want to do anti-Trump humor need to understand that Trump himself is a comedian. I'm not saying Trump is just a clown, and it's crazy that we made a clown President. I'm saying, whatever his worth as human being carrying out the duties of the presidency, he is also a comic talent, with many humorous insights, great timing, and — like the greatest comedians — he's challenging us to see what's funny and what's serious as he mixes it up and causes anxiety that we can relieve if we climb out of the ocean of confusion and onto the island of laughter.

You don't have to like any given comedian, and a comedian who wields tremendous political power is going to fail to amuse most people. In fact, whatever your politics, you're not going to be a very funny comedian if you just think of the President as a wonderful humorist and laugh at his jokes. But you should understand the way in which he means to be funny and project yourself into the minds of the many people who do respond to his humor. You should do this, not because he deserves respect, but because it's the foundation for writing better humor yourself.

If you've been finding it easy to make fun of Trump, you are not working hard enough. It's like trying to write a brief in a hard legal case and believing your adversary's arguments are just stupid. You'd better understand the way they make sense and the thinking of the people who might hear these arguments as cogent or you're not doing it right.

If Uber can find you from your cell phone, why can't the 911 system?

This is John Oliver, who has an obligation to be funny, and he is, even as he's explaining something truly horrific.

"In Iceland, there’s this idea that we don’t really belong in the world, this country in the middle of the ocean and so far from other countries."

"What I love about Iceland is that the only people we admire are poets. There are no great conquerors or heroes, no great industrial tycoons or politicians, and no respect for businesspeople or material wealth. Many of our sagas are about outlaws—there is even a statue of the Outlaw in Reykjavík, next to the National Museum—and the idea of the outlaw here is similar to the idea of the artist. I think making art comes from being a little allergic to society, not wanting to belong."

Said Ragnar Kjartansson, quoted in "Play It Again/How Ragnar Kjartansson turns repetition into art" in The New Yorker.

ADDED: After the Panama Papers, in Iceland, they threw eggs and bananas at Parliament:

The problem of relabeling Trump as "Drumpf."

Many of those who seek to diminish Donald Trump have jumped at the idea of tagging him with the name Drumpf, which was the surname of his ancestors if you go way back. You have to go back before his father immigrated to America, which was 1885, but it is there in the records. TV comedy man John Oliver seemed to think it was a very funny idea to rename Trump "Drumpf," because it sounds dumber, as many non-English names do to the ears of English-speakers.

But is that the kind of prejudice Trump-haters should want to stir up?

Immigrants in modern America, however, do not often change their names anymore..... Name changes do remain popular among entertainers. For example, Jon Stewart, whose “Daily Show” is in some ways the parent of Mr. Oliver’s HBO program, was born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz. As Mr. Oliver noted, Mr. Trump once criticized Mr. Stewart for changing his name, tweeting that “he should cherish his past — not run from it.”

And many politicians have also undergone name changes, notably two presidents, Bill Clinton, who changed his name from William Jefferson Blythe III, and Gerald Ford, who was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. Mr. Trump’s potential opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton, long held to her maiden name of Rodham, but she now campaigns without it.

Maybe Oliver should have checked to see which side would be helped more before he went with the idea of laughing at other people's funny names. But quite aside from that, this business of laughing at foreign names is — to use an epithet often thrown at Trump — xenophobic.

By the way, I have a last name that got anglicized in its spelling, in the Drumpf/Trump fashion. Althaus became Althouse. My family name, like Trump's got respelled in the 17th century. I've always understood a name change like that as a kindness to the ordinary people who were going to be trying to spell it. You've anticipated the difficulty, accommodated them, and, graciously, made them correct.

"When John Oliver planted a giant bag of marijuana in my hand Sunday night and broadcast it to millions of HBO viewers, I immediately thought of Chekhov."

"In one of the Russian master’s shortest short stories, a lowly civil servant is so ecstatic to find an article about himself in the newspaper that he cannot stop bragging to family and friends — even though the story relays how he was run over by a horse while crossing the street in a drunken stupor. This is really all you need to know about fame and media in 2015. It’s also precisely how I felt when several eagle-eyed friends messaged me on Facebook that my 1992 Stuyvesant High School prom picture had somehow ended up in an Oliver segment about — what else? — lethal injections in Nebraska.... There I was, a dorky, baby-faced 17-year-old kid with braces and an ill-fitting, ill-chosen white dinner jacket, with one arm draped awkwardly around my beautiful date and the other, thanks to HBO and the magic of Photoshop, toting a whole lot of weed. It was embarrassing. Horrifying. And hilarious. So naturally I shared it with everyone I know. But there was one thing that didn’t make sense. My date, Toby Bochan, who remains one of my closest friends, put it simply on Facebook: 'How did they get this photo. How?'..."

From Jeremy Olshan's "How my 1992 prom picture ended up on HBO’s John Oliver show."

Although I haven't quite hit the big time, I do know what it's like to become a stock photo.

Jon Stewart is leaving "The Daily Show" and Brian Williams is leaving "NBC Nightly News."

Williams is suspended for 6 months. I guess they want to see if we'll forget why he left and start wondering why he's gone, so they can bring him back. That's all very lame and pathetic, and I don't watch the nightly news, so there's a limit to my outrage about NBC's wan interest in the truth.

Stewart is gone for good, presumably, and by his own choice. 

Mr. Stewart, whose contract with Comedy Central ends in September, disclosed his plans during a taping of the program on Tuesday.

Saying that “in my heart, I know it is time for someone else” to have the opportunity he had, Mr. Stewart told his audience that he was still working out the details of his departure, which “might be December, might be July.”

“I don’t have any specific plans,” Mr. Stewart said, addressing the camera at the end of his show, at times seeming close to tears. “Got a lot of ideas. I got a lot of things in my head. I’m going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people.”

Reading that, I feel a tad skeptical. The man is in contract negotiations! Comedy Central just lost Stephen Colbert, and Stewart must believe they really need continuity on "The Daily Show." Stewart has stayed in his place there for 16 years, while his subordinate comedians — Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — have moved on to bigger things. They owe him. His departure might be December, might be July? Might be years from now! Throw more money at Mr. Stewart, Comedy Central, you cheap bastards! Show some respect! Show some gratitude!

He said he wants to spend more time with his family. That's code for: I didn't want to have to leave. Isn't it?

That reminds me of something from this Daily Beast article about David Axelrod and his new book that's going to be the basis of my next post:

["Believer: My Forty Years in Politics"] recounts... his parents’ divorce and his father’s subsequent suicide; and his guilty conscience over his own role as an often-absent parent, working on out-of-town campaigns while his wife, Susan, kept the family together as they confronted the challenge of raising a daughter seriously disabled by epileptic seizures.

“It was painful to write some of that,” Axelrod says, noting that he as he put together the family chapters, he sent them to his eldest son, Michael, as a cautionary note: “Don’t do to your kids what I did to you.”

The Scotland/England relationship, understood in romantic terms.

By John Oliver. This is long but I recommend the whole thing:



ADDED: I think Oliver wants Scots to vote "no" on independence, but he lays out the reasons for their grievance with the relationship with England and gets the audience identifying with them to the point where they burst into a huge cheer with a big Scottish flag unfurls (at 14:52). The emotions of nationalism are strange and powerful. With the right manipulation, an audience that doesn't even possess that nationality can feel the nationalism of others.

AND: Why do flags have such a powerful effect on the human mind? I'd like to see some serious research on this subject? Did you know that the study of flags is called "vexillology"? Here's the flag of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations:

14 minutes of income-inequality humor...

... from John Oliver...



... and 4 screens of complaining about it from Twitchy.

Ryan Seacrest's "shocking" Jeff Probst routine.

The night they made the "American Idol" contestant vote on whether to nullify the vote America went to all that trouble to phone in.

Caleb Johnson jumped right out in front of the group and proposed they unionize. Yes? Keep the group together?” he asked. Alex Preston seemed hesitant, and said either “no” or “I don’t know”...

When they came back from commercial, Seacrest read the votes —which were cast anonymously — like Jeff Probst reading results at the end of an episode of “Survivor.”...

So what was all this about? Were producers attempting to save Sam Woolf yet again? Or were they just trying to add a dose of intrigue to the show’s lowest-rated season?

Further, who were the two “no” votes?

Well, they all had an interest in acting like they love each other, but Caleb grabbed the most credit for acting out that love. Did any or all of them worry that the truth of how each of them voted would come out, and that the discrepancy would be held against them? Perhaps they are even too honest to act as if they're voting "yes" when they are voting "no."

I found this "twist" really irritating. Don't incite the public to vote and then interpose a veto. The ordeal of watching all those performances is endurable only because you know somebody's getting the boot.

"John Oliver gets his own show — on HBO."

"HBO President Michael Lombardo said that the network wasn’t 'searching for another weekly talk show'..."

Oh, no? Because Bill Maher has been just awful.

"...  but aimed to snag Oliver after seeing him fill in as a guest host for Jon Stewart on 'The Daily Show' over the summer while Stewart directed a film."

True! Oliver deserves it, and I look forward to watching.