I’m really excited to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, a collection co-edited with the brilliant duo of Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson. Just as Jon Stewart smacks down Cramer and CNBC, it seems a fine time for the book to come out.

I hope you’ll agree that the cover is really top-notch. We found the picture, but NYU Press did a great job of framing it, and it looks very snappy. After Routledge’s botching of my Simpsons book cover (if only you could see what it was meant to be, you’d share my pain), I guess I was owed some paratextual good fortune, and here it is.

The book began at the Flow conference in 2006, as (by my memory) a result of two walks between the University of Texas and the Dog and Duck Pub. One of them was with Ethan, the other with Jeff, neither of whom I’d met before. If you know Austin, you know that it’s not all that long a walk, but each trip was long enough for us to immediately get along with each other and for us to agree that there wasn’t enough good stuff on satire out there. So we floated the idea of doing a collection, and a month later we were working on it. Jeff and Ethan were an absolute joy to work with, always on the ball, fiercely intelligent, and darn funny guys, thus making the whole process a lot more enjoyable.

We also worked with a great group of contributors. Let me share with you the table of contents:

Foreword by David Marc

Part I: Post 9/11, Post Modern, or Just Post Network?

• “The State of Satire, the Satire of State” (Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, Ethan Thompson)
• “With All Due Respect Satirizing Presidents From Saturday Night Live to Lil’ Bush” (Jeffrey P. Jones)
• “Tracing the ‘Fake’ Candidate in American Television Comedy” (Heather Osborne-Thompson)

Part II: Fake News, Real Funny

• “And Now… the News? Mimesis and the Real in The Daily Show” (Amber Day)
• “Jon Stewart and The Daily Show: I Thought You Were Going to Be Funny!” (Joanne Morreale)
• “Stephen Colbert’s Parody of the Postmodern” (Geoffrey Baym)

Part III: Building in the Critical Rubble: Between Deconstruction and Reconstruction

• “Throwing Out the Welcome Mat: Public Figures as Guests and Victims in TV Satire” (Jonathan Gray)
• “Speaking ‘Truth’ to Power? Television Satire, Rick Mercer Report, and the Politics of Place and Space” (Serra Tinic)
• “Why Mitt Romney Won’t Debate a Snowman” (Henry Jenkins)

Part IV: Shock and Guffaw: The Limits of Satire

• “Good Demo, Bad Taste: South Park as Carnivalesque Satire” (Ethan Thompson)
• “In the Wake of ‘The Nigger Pixie’: Dave Chappelle and the High Cost of De Facto Crossover” (Bambi Haggins)
• “Of Niggas and Citizens: The Boondocks Fans and Differentiated Black American Politics” (Avi Santo)

It was a great group to work with, and they made our job so much easier. Ultimately, we made this book since it was one that we wanted to read, and the contributors didn’t disappoint.

So, if you’re teaching a class (or just a section: NYU Press price their books to sell, so this one’s list price is $22, yet I note that Amazon’s selling it for $14.85 right now) on popular politics, satire, or comedy, please consider the book. Or you don’t need to be teaching the book to enjoy it, so grab a copy yourself. It’s set to be released on April 1, no joke.

Here are the endorsements on the back:

“This smart and savvy crew has noticed something creeping up on us, something with bite. Now we have to take satire TV seriously; it turns out to be the bearer of the democratic spirit for the post-broadcast age. In this field-shaping book, some of the brightest talents in TV studies show us how the marginal has become the model for a much-needed media make-over. See what happens when entertainment bares its teeth.”
— John Hartley, author of Television Truths

“It has been said that if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny.  This wonderful collection proves that nothing could be farther from the truth.  Satire TV takes the study of comedy in new directions, expanding beyond earlier work done on classical Hollywood cinema and the sitcom.  In politically trying times, the contributors to this volume reveal through analysis of programs such as South Park, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, laughter is not the best medicine—it is the surgeon’s scalpel.”
— Heather Hendershot, editor of Nickelodeon Nation

First, though, a word on categorization – if I saw it in 2008, it’s on this list, even if it came out earlier; and if I saw it on the Internet, it’s web video not television.

Television

10. Chuck. The show is infinitely silly, but that’s the point. Like Pushing Daisies, it kept me sane in hard times. Adam Baldwin, Awesome, Lester – fun stuff.

9. Food Network in HD. I knew when I got my HDTV that I’d love travel shows all the more, and nature shows. But I didn’t count on how much food porn I could stomach on a daily basis, and how that threshold would increase with HD.

8. Obama’s DNC Speech. Quickly forgotten because of the rise of Palin, it was excellent and worthy of greater remembrance. It began with meat and potatoes, then rose to his characteristic rhetorical heights at the end. I watched it in Canada and felt hopeful that with someone like this as President, I wouldn’t need to flee to Canada.

7. The Daily Show’s interview of the sitting mayor of Wasilla. The interview was strong satire, easily proving how woefully unprepared a Wasilla mayor would be for the vice presidency, let alone the presidency. But above and beyond the content was the fact that TDS scooped the mainstream news. This was a moment that proves why America needs TDS and Colbert – since the press is largely lazy, flabby, and inept. Why did we need a comedy show to tell us what the mayor of Wasilla or a community organizer actually does? For all those who worry about an America that gets its news from TDS and Colbert, look no further than this incident for evidence of why such worry is displaced when the press can hardly tie its shoelaces on a good day.

6. Stephen Colbert’s election coverage. I like Colbert, but am much more of a Stewart man. That said, Colbert soared in the election, with deep, cutting, Juvenalian satire at its best. On many a night, he really showed how satire is meant to work. I especially loved his interview of the actual Socialist Presidential Candidate in a week when the Republicans had spuriously decided that Obama was a Marxist. For an entertainer whose act is occasionally mistaken as the real thing, his bile was palpable these last few months, and I love me some good satire.

5. Man vs. Wild. I discovered this show late this year, and fell in love. Bear Grylls is hilarious, an amusing paragon of the British, “oh well, let’s give it a go, lads” attitude, and the show does a lovely job of balancing cringe-TV, travel TV, educational TV, and comedy.

4. Pushing Daisies. I don’t know if I could take more than two episodes back to back, but this show is so delightful, so refreshing, and so fun, all things that I really needed this semester. It was a balm, and ABC’s cancellation of it is a crying shame. One of my fellow Extratextuals ain’t a fan of whimsy, but when it’s done right, I sure am.

3. Lost’s 4th Season. This was a great season for the show. After “tapdancing” for the last two seasons, this one really got down to business. Half of what they’re doing is completely stupid in the abstract, but most of it is really working in practice. And I like shows like Lost or The Wire where I love enough of what’s going on that I can have long discussions about what’s not working without losing my love of the show.

2. Obama’s Victory. Jesse Jackson’s tears were a poignant reminder of the historical resonance of the moment. And the press were, understandably, quick to tout the first African American president angle too. But even without the older history, this was an important victory. When the McCain/Palin strategy devolved to the worst form of fear-mongering that has been the hallmark of Bush’s scourge of a presidency, surely I wasn’t alone in feeling that voters were determining the very soul of the nation, and the tenor of public discourse for years to come. Obama will no doubt disappoint me (which is why it’s #2, btw), but that night offered at least the hopes of an antidote to an eight year-old sickness. Hearing my neighborhood erupt as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and eventually the nation were called, too, made it all the more magical. Serial television comes no better than this year’s election campaign, and what a great ending!

1. The Wire’s penultimate episode, “Late Editions.” Season 5 wasn’t as great as it could’ve been, but this episode was the best hour I’ve spent in front of a television. Ever. Granted, it had to work to get me to this point. So, for instance, I’m sure Bubbles’ speech, Marlo’s monologue, or Dukie and Michael’s exchange wouldn’t mean much to non-Wire fans, but for those of us who were there for the whole ride, all three were remarkable, and devastating. As was Snoop’s last scene. The final episode wasn’t anything special, but this episode was pure beauty, television writing and acting at its best.
Honorable Mention – Hole in the Wall. This show must have been made for very drunk and/or very high people, since it’s completely whacked. But how can one not laugh at a show that announces to a full arena audience, “It’s time to face the hole!”?

Reading

In terms of leisure reading, I don’t tend to read many books anymore, odd since I love lit. For academic stuff, 2008 was mostly a year for writing, without as much reading outside my duties as co-editor of Popular Communication, or as reviewer for various presses and journals. So I apologize for the lack of books. Also, I won’t count academic articles, only books and websites.

10. Mike Newman’s Faves 2008. The list to end all lists. Love it. Thanks Mike.

9. Metacritic.com. A review aggregator, for movies, film, and games. Very helpful.

8. Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan’s an odd creature politically, but that’s why I like reading him. DailyKos and HuffPo can only go so far before one wants to rattle the cage. Sullivan makes me miss British Tories – people whose politics are quite opposed to mine, yet who I can have a discussion with that doesn’t begin and end with the note that I’m going to Hell and am enabling the terrorists with my beliefs.

7. Better Living Through Reality TV, by Laurie Ouellette and James Hay. Excellent analysis of reality television as a tool of neoliberal governance. I hate the word “neoliberal” (because nobody outside academia gets it, and so I question its utility), and thus for Ouellette and Hay to make me override my dislike of the word for the duration of the book is testament to how it is composed.

6. The Chutry Experiment. Chuck Tryon’s blog is great. I’m a waffler, as you’ve no doubt seen if you read this blog. So my posts are long. But I really like how Chuck’s stubs point me towards all sorts of things. And when he does extend a post, the analysis is reliably strong.

5. Heartland TV, by Vicky Johnson. This book is really good, mixing television history, textual analysis, policy discussion, and good, revelatory cultural analysis. It captures brilliantly the odd paradox whereby American transform the “Heartland” into the site of authentic, warm, (white), honest American virtue, while also making it a backward hinterland.

4. Great Lies to Tell Small Kids, by Andy Riley. Riley’s Bunny Suicide books are hilarious, and so too are these. Well worth the read, especially if you have friends with kids, and you want to mess with them.

3. Ethan Thompson’s What Me, Subversive? Television and Parody in Postwar America. Okay, so I’ve only seen the manuscript, and it’s early days yet, which means it may not be out till late 2009 or possibly 2010, and it may be even better when it’s out, but let me be the first to hype the thing. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that South Park, Jon Stewart, and Dave Chappelle were the first to find inappropriate, edgy, smart humor a home on American television, but Ethan’s historical look at subversive comedy in postwar America shows the lineage with great skill. When released, it will be a major work of comedy studies, and of television history. Keep your eyes open for it.

2. Facebook status updates. I know what 200+ nice people are doing with ease. How cool is that?

1. FiveThirtyEight.com. Nate Silver probably had as much of my time as did my wife between August and November, as I checked his stats and analyses about twenty times a day. Addiction doesn’t come close to characterizing my relationship to this site. In Winnicottian terms, it was a transitional object to beat all transitional objects.

Back later with more …

Lively and Badgely’s ad mocks the “talk to your kids about drugs” PSAs by imploring young viewers to talk to their parents about voting McCain. Lively and Badgely are Gossip Girl’s resident good kids (well, as good as one could be in that show, I guess), and their make-believe school suffers from substance abuse aplenty. Thus, one can imagine them to be called upon to deliver the “don’t do drugs” message; instead, a more sinister behavior concerns them – voting McCain. One could imagine a more conflicted ad if the stars were replaced with Gossip Girl’s resident bad kids, Leighton Meester (Blair) and Ed Westwick (Chuck).

Hayden Pannetiere’s piece also plays with her character. In Heroes, she’s invincible, and fighting to save the world. Moreover, as anyone aware of this thing called “popular culture” knows, Heroes’ catch-phrase in Season One was “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World,” and Pannetiere was the cheerleader in question. So, when she warns of how “we’ll all probably die,” there’s a (playful) added level of horror, as if the only thing worse than Sylar, Adam, or another Ali Larter character is McCain.

I realize now that my last post was also about stars using their characters to add weight to a political message. And, of course, the obvious other example is Martin Sheen, who got many years worth of political rallies and stump speeches out of being the beloved Jed Bartlet. All are interesting examples of how to use one’s stardom as para/inter/extratext.

This coming week, I’m off to the Flow Conference in Austin, TX. I’m on a panel about women in comedy, and my primary interest lay in discussing women in animation. But I’ve been wanting to talk about Tina Fey and her excellent Palin impression instead. And so I thought I’d write on that topic latter here.

Let’s start by making something clear. I am not a fan of Saturday Night Live. Most of its humor is tepid and puerile. They might have a funny nugget, but it’s five seconds worth of a five minute skit. SNL has had some funny people, yes, but they’re nearly always considerably funnier off the show. Also, while I’m sure its defenders will point out some of its fantastic skits over the years, and while I too think they’ve had some brilliant moments, their failure to success ratio is huge.

More specifically, I have a beef with SNL’s fans who misuse the word “satire,” by suggesting that many of the show’s rather lame impressions are in any way satirical. Dana Carvey did a good George H. W. Bush, but there was no satire. Fred Armisen’s Obama isn’t even good, let alone satirical. Satire scholar George Test notes that satire must have play, aggression, laughter, and judgment, and too often SNL lacks all but play. I could put on a dress and say I’m Laura Bush, but that wouldn’t make it satire. Perhaps the best test of an impressionist’s satiric skill is whether the person being impersonated would be offended or uncomfortable watching it; if yes, bravo.

But Tina Fey’s recent impression of Palin is a refreshing change of pace for SNL. As a result, she’s become what a good satirical impression should be: a nasty, unshakeable paratext hanging around the candidate’s official appearances, and standing between the citizen-viewer and the candidate. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that Tina Fey is, right now, the most socially relevant and important comedian on television because of her impression.

More after the fold…

From a paratextual and intertextual standpoint, I’ve been fascinated to see how successful her impressions have been. Blogs and op-ed pieces everywhere are quoting Fey when commenting on Palin, sometimes with no seeming awareness of the slip. Thus, for instance, the “can see Russia from my window/backyard” comment crops up all over the place, many times without direct invocation of Fey. Ironically too, as eerily on-the-money as Fey’s impression is, many people’s impressions of Palin are in fact impressions of Fey’s impression. Thus, Fey’s impression has definitely become a dominant frame through which many people are viewing, talking about, and thinking about Sarah Palin.

Obviously, Fey has the physical likeness working for her. Freud notes that tendentious humor is aggressive, releasing anxiety, hence our proclivity to laugh at people. Since Fey looks so much like Palin, it allows one to engage in a censorious laughter at Palin while watching Fey, in a way that we can’t laugh at Bush so easily when Ferrell does him or at Obama when Armisen does him. She also has the voice down, or, rather, she offers a lovely mix that’s close enough to Palin yet pulling it slightly closer to Fargo, and hence to further silliness.

It’s also a well-timed impression. By the time Carvey did Bush, Sr., we all knew who he was. Chase hardly introduced us to Ford. But Palin is still such an unknown to much of the world outside Wasilla. In my book, I distinguish between entryway paratexts and in medias res paratexts, the first grabbing us before we’ve seen or heard a text, the latter in the middle. Entryway paratexts can create the text before we’ve got there, and set early frames, while in medias res can shift and toggle, especially if there’s more of them than there is of the show itself. Fey’s impression is likely darn close to entryway for most citizen-viewers. In part due to the McCain campaign’s sexist strategy of acting like Palin needs protecting from the media, we haven’t seen all that much of Palin. One big speech. A few soundbites from her train wreck interviews. And now the debate. Using the analogy of the paratext, it’s almost as though we’ve seen a sneak preview for a television show, watched an ad or three, and read the reviews, but the show hasn’t quite started, or has only just started. At such a point in a text’s birth, paratexts have all the more power. So whereas it would be a lot harder to reframe Obama or McCain, the text of what Palin is and what she represents can be toggled with considerable ease. It’s all the harder for Palin to lay claim to being a serious candidate when Fey’s impression keeps coming back each Saturday night and on Hulu quickly thereafter.

For those who watch 30 Rock, or even for those who have seen Mean Girls, the impression is all the more stark for how un-Fey-like it is. Fey is a smart woman, and her characters are usually smart. But her Palin is abjectly stupid. Fey’s Liz Lemon can be neurotic and unsure of herself, but she is full of depth. Her Palin is sure of herself but shouldn’t be. Lemon is a little uncomfortable with adulthood at times, but Fey’s Palin thinks she’s all grown up, really just Ralph Wiggum. Fey has worked her way up to where she is. Her Palin has been thrust into an undeserved limelight. Thus the intertextual weight that is Tina Fey is important in tempering the impression. After all, the right wing’s key attack against anyone who has dared to suggest that Palin may be unqualified has been that this is sexist and demeaning to women. But ghosted behind Fey’s impression is a legitimately strong, smart, qualified woman, and thus her impression carries with it the haunting reminder of what Palin is not. In the character’s first appearance, SNL placed her alongside Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton for contrast, but Poehler isn’t needed for those who know Fey’s work: Fey provides contrast enough.

I’m also intrigued by the economics of the impression (and by a certain irony in it). Fey is a star, both more talented and more acclaimed than many of SNL’s cast. Her impression has become hugely popular. And with SNL trying to make the move to Thursday night, where 30 Rock and The Office have conditioned viewers to expect smarter humor than SNL usually offers, the show really needs its big guns right now. So there is a lot invested in her impression for them. Traditionally, SNL has been so unsatiric because, as a network show, they don’t want to offend anyone. Hence their ultimately unoffensive impressions. Now, though, they have good reason to keep coming back with more.

Meanwhile, the real Palin (if such a being exists. At times I wonder if she is, like Paris Hilton or a boy band, just an amalgam of marketing ideas!) really only has one strategy open to try and explode the impression. Complaining about satire only makes one look stupid, and while complaining that Katie Couric was too tough on you is already laughable, if Palin and McCain wanted to complain of victimization from SNL, that hardly gels with their gun-toting, “we don’t blink” image. Instead, if she wants people to see her and not Fey’s impression, Palin must hold some press conferences. If the paratext is becoming the text, if she and the McCain campaign still want to reassert their right to author her as text, they need to do so, not just in rallies in small towns, but on the big stage. Right now, as suggested above, the text of Palin risks being swallowed by the paratext of the impression. Kudos to Tina Fey for finding the satiric punch to do that.