Home OP-ED Tramp Television — You Can Tune in Every Weeknight

Tramp Television — You Can Tune in Every Weeknight

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I have been out late the last two evenings — Monday at the City Council meeting, last night at Forescee Hogan-Rowles’s campaign headquarters along Crenshaw Boulevard. Since it was well past the dinner hour and Diane already had retired, I brought my meal and newspapers to the television viewing area.

Comedy never will go out of fashion as long as there is a Democrat party.

These boys are a stitch, commonly noisy and coarse but smile-worthy.

They are so darned consumed with the panoply of obscene sins they say Republicans skip overnight sleep to think up, they don’t have time to assess the Democrat party.

If you are even a sliver depressed, tune in to roly-poly Eddie Schultz at 10 on MSNBC and don’t change the channel at 11. You think the Sheen show cancellation was big? Did you know the Howdy Doody Show has been replaced by “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” a presumed tribute to the colored portion of Mr. Matthews that ranges above his shoulders?

The Comedy Hall of Fame

(The next time you spot a left-wing essayist or commentator talking about non-Republican politicians, tell me because that will be news.)

Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Tom and Dickie Smothers, Obama and Osama (“You think up a response to Libya because Mad Michelle has me washing dishes every night”) — none of these pseudo legendary comedy teams ever supplied the voluminous chuckles that Mr. Schultz and Mr. Matthews unintentionally evoke.

Both nights after I turned off the television, their voices still were bouncing off our living room walls until after 1 a.m.

Because I am the slapstick fan in our family, the crude, bucolic Mr. Schultz, the rajah of rage, delivers more laughs than Mr. Matthews who recycles the same flat punch lines four nights a week with the same dreary guests.

Mr. Schultz, who bears a slender resemblance to Fatty Arbuckle, is today’s answer to the carnival bearded lady who was hot when I was growing up.

I Think I Am Getting Angry

Doesn’t take much to ignite Mr. Schultz’s temper, which he inherited from the most frequently fired left-winger in America, Keith Olbermann. If Mr. Schultz suspects that a restaurant patron in the next state is inhaling second-hand smoke, he will furiously descend into a dizzying, repetitious spin on camera. For the last two or three weeks, Eddie has been obsessed with delegitimizing the governor of Wisconsin, the way Palestinians teach their children to think of Israelis.

Criticism, whether measured or ratcheted up, would be a fair response. Eddie may have learned at his left-wing university that a television host never should risk embarrassment.

Instead of soberly probing the unusual and heavily emotional case to genuinely determine the animating and possibly changing forces on both sides, he conducts one of the fake 1950s-style quiz shows where the contestants knew the answers in advance. Every night he only interviews fellow left-wingers in Wisconsin, giving them cupcake questions such as “Republicans say yer mudda wore Army boots. You don’t agree with that, do you?”

Maybe Ed Wynn didn’t die after all.

No wonder MSNBC is fighting so hard against the outlawing of prostitution within their network. What would Eddie and Chris do every night?