I was browsing the magazine rack today and I came across an issue of Emmet Tyrell’s radical-right magazine, The American Spectator, with a front-page story nameing the bestselling America: The Book, by John Stewart and the other writers of The Daily Show, as “The Worst Book of the Year.” See http://www.spectator.org/dsp_currentIssue.asp. This is an actual prize (the Cooger Prize or something like that) which TAS gives out every year.
I read the article on this, which was written by Tyrell himself, from beginning to end, without gleaning the least idea of why he found the book objectionable, or stupid, or whatever his objection was. He simply quoted a few jokes from the book, apparently on the assumption that their lameness was self-evident. But it isn’t, at least to me.
I thought of posting this in CS, since it’s about a book, and a pop-culture phenomenon; but it’s also political, so I guess it would wind up in GD before to long, so here it is.
Is any of you familiar with this issue of TAS? If so, do you understand what the hell Tyrell was talking about?
What’s to understand? Righty magazine doesn’t like lefty book that attacks righties. I’m sure it happens in reverse - if Anne Coulter’s releases don’t commonly receive Michael Moore’s Worst of the Year rating or something like that, I’d be suprised.
Nor would I – but I would expect the criticism in question to have some substance to it, something more in-depth and meaty than, “I don’t like this.” (And, so far, I have not been disappointed – Al Franken really reamed Coulter inside-out in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, dissecting her lies and errors in enthusiastic detail, and he did it a lot funner than she is capable of being.)
Diehard liberal here, and I must say I found A:tB tedious in the extreme. I doubt I would agree with Tyrell about anything else (and in fact, I’m not sure I’d even completely agree with him about this: after all, tedious as Stewart’s book was, there had to be worse books published this past year), but I’m not going to waste powder and shot on the righties on this one.
I don’t think I’ve got any more “in-depth”, “meaty”, or “substantial” criticism to offer than you say Tyrell did, though. Why didn’t I like A:tB? Well, it was just lame. Dull. Tedious. All the jokes hammered to death. Couldn’t decide whether it was trying to be all satire or partly informative, so it ended up alternating description with repetitive smartass comments, like the insufferable co-worker who thinks he’s so witty and cynical he can’t get through a sentence without bitching about something. Boring.
I’ve got nothing against Stewart and I’ve heard good things about the Daily Show, but that book was a dud. I read it through in order to be able to say nice things about it to the person who gave it to me, and then I abandoned it in a subway car.
It’s alot better as coffee table or bathroom reading, where you just read snippets at a time. This is how I read it, and I thought it was funny, but I wouldn’t want to sit down and read it for an hour straight through like I would a novel. YMMV.
And yeah, I agree that while Stewart is certainly a liberal and certainly has no quams about touting his views on his show, the book didn’t really show any political leanings. I think The Spectator is being somewhat disingenuous and taking thier feelings about The Daily Show’s political leanings on America (the book not the nation).
The book is kind of fun to poke through, kind of a bathroom book. Calling it “lefty” is quite a stretch. There’s no “statement” from the book, except maybe subtly deploring state of textbooks.
Stewart has said on the show many times, and I don’t think he’s quite kidding, that they knocked it out in 2 weeks. It shows, but they still are funny people.
