Posted on 09/16/2017 3:11:00 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Once upon a time Red State types were just like their Blue State brethren.
They settled in for the night by watching Jay, Conan, Dave, or Jimmy. A few monologue jokes later, and they were off to dreamland with a grin on their faces.
That was then, and by "then" we mean roughly five years ago. Today, some of the late-night faces have changed. Jay became Jimmy (Fallon). Dave gave way to Stephen (Colbert). And new talent like Trevor Noah, Jim Jefferies, and Chelsea Handler entered the arena.
The entire tenor of late night changed, too. What was once a comic free-for-all where stars gathered to hawk their product became yet another cog in the Left-Wing Propaganda Machine.
Sure, some product hawking still goes on. A few monologue jokes make you smile. But seemingly every night, on nearly every show, there's an angry comment, a rant or simply a vulgar turn of phrase aimed directly at the GOP.
Remember the oral sex joke Colbert told about President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? Or, more recently, how Jimmy Kimmel cracked that Sen. Ted Cruz pleasures himself to the thought of poor people lacking health care.
Comedy Central's Jefferies once called First Lady Melania Trump both "wooden" and a "dirty girl."
Late night went from Johnny Carson mocking himself for a lousy gag to comedians trafficking in the most offensive ways to insult politicians they hate (GOP members and their "co-conspirators").
And the hate flows freely on most late-night shows, with "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon" being a notable exception. "Conan" over at TBS often sticks to the late-night script, too.
Matters will only get worse when progressive comic Sarah Silverman enters the fray.
Which begs the question: are there any right-of-center souls sticking around to watch it? If so ... why?
None of this means conservatives should wall themselves off from criticism. Nor should we adopt the pose struck by some Trump Train passengers, whose skins are as thin as our commander in chief's. It's just that watching shows that rigorously insult one worldview while giving the other a pass isn't entertaining for those in the crosshairs. So why watch it when the modern content revolution is in full swing? Endure the umpteenth time Colbert demands Trump resign, or watch one of Netflix's killer shows like "Ozark"?
Not a tough call.
What's most amazing is that no one in Hollywood is stepping up to address the sizable imbalance. Years ago, Roger Ailes looked at the TV news landscape and realized an alternative voice was in order. His Fox News didn't just rock cable television. The channel owned it.
There’s a story behind the Carson Rivers relationship.
She was a regular stand-in for him. She did it few a period of years. At some point she either stood in for someone else, or performed in some manner that he saw as a betrayal, or damaging to his brand. He thought she had been disloyal.
He determined never to put her on his show again.
I always thought of her as a big-mouth obnoxious person. When she guest hosted, I wouldn’t tune in. She grated me something fierce.
The network didn’t have to over-rule Carson on this.
As for Leno, I think Carson was comfortable with it. I know he didn’t seem to come on the show and support Leno to the degree some folks might have hoped he would, but Carson was actually a strident introvert. He wasn’t a big social setting type of guy, even as popular in the night-time entertainment time slot.
I think his ability to handle guests, do decent interesting interviews, and draw them out were second to none. His ability to take an insult and turn it right back on the guest was proven to be instinctive and natural. The right thing to say just popped into his head in an instant. Guests knew better than to push their luck.
If Carson had never existed, maybe Leno would have seemed decent. To me he was always a very stiff guy. He seemed to be formulaic, because it just didn’t seem natural.
With Carson, it always was.
When Carson had his one and a half hour show, he would have big names on, and they would stay for the entire show. By the end of those shows, he would have three to five incredibly big names on, and the give and take was amazing. These people fed off each other and the dynamic was unmatched by anything going on today.
Someone mentioned Jimmy Fallon on the thread. He has some of the best comedic instincts of them all these days. While I am not impressed with his politics, he can be truly funny. Some of his skits rival the old Carson skits.
My children....now in their 30’s love Fallon, I don’t want to touch the politics. I can barely watch Tucker completely through, though I love the show. Politics are poison, gathering the information that my head is full of is probably poison to me. I absolutely KNOW too much to ignore reality.
Thanks for the mention, regarding your 30 something aged kids. I have also grown tired of the incessant arguing on these shows.
I read about things and leave it at that.
It is sad to see the world as it is, but it would be a whole lot more sad to not know the world for what it is.
I want the Sunday screaming faces shows to be full-contact MMA contests.
There have been times when I wanted pretty much the same thing.
There are times when the Leftist person deserves it so much.
I’m following behind that first post with a few more comments.
I try to keep up with movies that are out. The content and societal values displayed are important mileposts to me.
It seems to me that some of the action movies are losing the ability to cope with ever increasing demands to be relevant, or ground-breaking.
One of the last Transformer movies was almost maniacal during it’s action sequences. You could hardly make heads or tails of the action. Of course the good guys won in the end, but scenes were so overloaded, it became hard to follow the sides clearly.
It was just a jumble of screen noise that wound up with the good side winning.
I watched a move the other night about two female “friends” that got the hots for one guy. Their behavior became so destructive, that they were willing to do things that seriously jeopardized their “friend”. I believe at one point they actually portrayed one of them willing to kill the other to get this guy.
It wound up that they both got him, slept with him. And then they found out, he was actually on his way to his wedding.
The movie wound up being one of the worst examples of loose morals I’ve seen. The female characters were disgusting. I thought it was more insulting to women than just about any movie I’ve seen.
The guy actually spent most of the movie avoiding them.
They finally got him to give in. And then when they found out he was to be married, they actually blamed him for all of it.
It’s disconcerting to see films like this passed off as a great date night thing to go see.
Yikes. I feel for people in their thirties sometimes, the media that is foisted off on them.
Thanks, that’s very informative. I guess I haven’t seen a lot of pre-Balanchine ballet.
Just don’t. It rots your brain. Sex is one alternative.
Last month I watched about 2 hours of Leon’s Headlines on the big tv with my son. They are all on YouTube. They never stop! After a while we’d had enough. Took a while before we had to stop, though. Couples who put wedding announcements in their local papers like “the Slammen Beaver Wedding” take a while to get old!
Leno! Not Leon.
My brother was one: the Knott-Wright Wedding.
Something wrong there.... LOL.
Seriously, if your two names combine poorly, why make that newspaper announcement at all?
The Offer Honor Wedding
The Wacker Dailey Wedding
The Long Wiwi Wedding
The Aiken Johnson Wedding
The Best Lay Wedding
The Kuntz Dick Wedding
Just get married! Just have the announcement say Congrats to Mr. And Mrs. Dickman! Forget that her maiden name was Busch!!! ;)
I was not involved in the planning. I assume my former sister-in-law’s parents were responsible.
Only late night worth spitting on was Carson
I did watch a Chris Farley rerun on Letterman on YouTube recently
Now Farley was funny
Poor insecure fat man......but so funny...
You’ve likely seen a lot—Petipa choreography included Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, and the Nutcracker, among others. But my personal favorite ballet is Copelia, and I don’t know who choreographed that. Russia still does a lot of traditional ballets.
You’re right. I have seen quite a few of those, either live or on video.
Arthur Saint-Leon choreographed Delibes’ “Coppelia.”
I love that ballet. No tragedy, great humor and romance, brilliant energetic dancing, and the Copelia Mazurka.
A Bolshoi production from 2011.
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