The only time I have ever had the Don Imus show on was when I left the radio WFAN on all night. It is a weird show and that essentially because it is unfunny. And not just in its current embarrassment for using a racial slur so much as the second year undergrad quality of the slur and all the other largely insult-based humour that goes on the show day after day. I don’t know who needs to hear that in the morning, just as I don’t know who needs to hear Rush Limbaugh and his apologism for anything that can hover before the addled mind behind that microphone. Is it that people in cars and with insufficient caffeine need to wake up to thoughts of superiority over over-paid idiots…or do people actually associate themselves with dolts like these and their mental wrongness?
I watched that new TV improv comedy show on NBC last night, Thank God You’re Here. Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall hosted. It was actually funny and funny in a way that was even more genial that Whose Line Is It Anyway, the last great stab at improv – especially the US version hosted by Drew Carey. Imus is essentially improv of a sort. Political audio improv. So is Limbaugh. Like the Second City sort of comedians, they really come armed with no clue as to what politics will thrust upon them on any given day (or apparently much background on the reasons behind what happens) and they have a regularly recycled set of knee-jerk reactions. Yet unlike Foley and Limbaugh, they are not witty – there is no gleam of a telling truth. Why? The inherent rut and dolt as much as anything. Can the two converge? Could John Stewart do unscripted political radio on a daily basis? Is it inevitable that there would be a wallowing in “guy laugh” – the sound unassociated with a joke – and simple vacuous nastiness? Hard to say as it as never existed otherwise.
Thank God for sports talk radio.