WAIT a second. Martha Stewart has a mean streak? How about our national entertainers, especially the late-night talk-show hosts? Most greeted her conviction with cheap and mean-spirited rim-shots that sufficed for topicality and cleverness.
Jay Leno, who now regularly wallows deeper in the below-the-belt, kick-’em-when-they’re-down humor, had a ball with Stewart’s fall. On “The Tonight Show,” he was no less mocking of Stewart, following her conviction, than he was of Saddam Hussein, following his capture.
Conan O’Brien piled it on, too. On “Late Night,” his schadenfreude – his glee over Stewart’s woe -made for bludgeoning, two-by-four gags. The Three Stooges were far more accomplished. Even AOL’s on-line homepage, after Stewart’s conviction, took a wise-guy whack: “On Martha’s Calendar Today: Meet With Probation Officer.”
In his latest book, “Seriously Funny,” Gerald Nachman, a chronicler of American entertainment, traces the rise of comedians, humorists and satirists throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s.
Besides making for a great read, “Seriously Funny” notes that current, mass-consumed comedy is too often confused with the good stuff.
Televised comedy, Nachman writes, has become obligatorily crude and mean-spirited; the brain is challenged less than the crotch is targeted and audiences aren’t moved to laugh as much as they are to hoot.
We’re fed a relentless diet of visceral, vengeful and vile cracks posed as comedy.
And Martha Stewart, a tragic figure if even by her own devices, is the latest in easy targets. That’s entertainment!
Actor Paul Winfield died this month at age 62. His obit in The New York Times noted many of his achievements – he played Don King in an HBO movie, he portrayed a college chancellor in “Roots,” a judge in “Picket Fences” and, at the peak of his career, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance opposite Cicely Tyson in “Sounder.”
But the obit did not note Winfield’s last and recurring role as the narrator on A&E’s “City Confidential,” a documentary series that generally traces a murder, from commission to incarceration, in American towns, big and small.
The narrative scripts on these shows found Winfield reading windy profiles of the towns and cities where these crimes were committed, profiles that always presented blanket indictments of the citizenry:
A murder in a Connecticut town left its wealthy, WASPY and haughty citizens in shock. A murder in a South Carolina town left its bible-thumping, narrow-minded citizens in shock.
Listening to Winfield, an African-American who frequently spoke out on issues of racial equality, advance such negative and unfair stereotypes – show after show – always left us uncomfortable. And confounded.
The NAACP’s annual “Image Awards,” seen last week on Fox, saved the appearance of actor/pro wrestler The Rock, for the end.
Perhaps, for the sake of imagery, the producer should’ve parlayed The Rock’s walk-on with a clip of him smacking a woman with a folding chair – one of the more printable images he produces when entertaining his WWE audiences.
And perhaps the NAACP was unaware that The Rock’s great enabler, WWE boss Vince McMahon, has long entertained his largely young audiences through negative black stereotypes, including pimps and prostitutes.
