This guy has been so bland and so out-of-it for so long that even jokes about how bad he is are quaint.
I read his columns when I’m bored in the breakroom at work simply because I read every column and article there. I mean, there’s really not much else to do.
It’s always just fluff because that’s Andy Rooney, but sometimes it’s so frighteningly ignorant that I have to wonder why anyone besides the nurses that scrub his ass would even pay one tiny bit of attention to him, let alone keep renewing his syndicated column and his segment on 60 Minutes.
Any random LiveJournal entry and even some especially detailed grocery lists are more interesting than what dribbles out of this old coot’s diapers.
Last week’s article was what inspired me to aim at this easy target in a Pit thread.
You see, Andy decided to critique Entertainment Weekly’s list of the most popular people on television, despite having apparently not turned on a TV since the late '50s.
Choice quotes:
Wow. Just… wow.
Jesus fucking Christ. This shit honestly makes my jaw drop. I have a great-grandmother who’s 103 and I think she’s more with-it than this fuck.
And he wraps it all up with…
Who? No, seriously, WHO? He honestly thinks that the MOST POPULAR person EVER to grace a TV screen is a name that 99% of people under 60 have never heard and will never hear in their entire lives? I seriously have no fucking clue who Arthur Goddamn Godfrey is.
This shit has moved way beyond pathetic. I don’t know if there’s even a word for its current status. He’s like a great-great-great uncle that says incredibly embarrassing and downright senile things at Thanksgiving dinner, but you don’t want to tell him to shut up because it’s considered bad form to disrespect World War I veterans.
That Rooney was not forcibly put out to pasture twenty years ago is ridiculous. That he’s still at it today is obscene.
He seems to know who Oprah and Homer are, but hasn’t actually seen them, at least from the way I’m reading it.
And if he is joking, why would he joke to make himself a more godawfully embarrassing representative of seniors than he already is?
When it comes to topics I’m incredibly ignorant about, I try to avoid writing about them rather than drawing attention to my ignorance. This guy gets paid to write about them!
You’re showing your own ignorance, which is certainly not Andy Rooney’s fault. I’d guess he was joking about the rest, at least in part.
Seems an odd sort of list, not differentiating between real people and fictional characters. Is Entertainment Weekly written by stupid people? Sounds likely. I don’t care for that.
Y’know what else I don’t like? The plastic stick-on things on those little bitty silver record albums they’re putting out nowadays. Hard to get off!
I saw him on 60 Minutes a few months ago delivering a commentary on why he doesn’t “think renting movies to watch at home for $5.00 is ever going to be the way most Americans see a movie.” I especially liked his comment on phones in movie theaters:
“There are all sorts of good things about actually going to a theater. Your phone doesn’t ring during the movie. No one starts talking to you about President Bush during an exciting part of the show. The seats are different than your chair in your living room but they are comfortable.”
I want to know which movie theater he’s going to in which people don’t use cell phones. He’s amazingly out of touch.
Arthur Godfrey was before my time (not a bad thing by some accounts) but he was a major force on TV in its early days, so Rooney has a point there.
Rooney himself deserves a place on the “50 Most Stultifying TV Bores Of All Time” list, probably at the top. It’s amazing how long he has been consistently non-entertaining.
If you think you’re qualified to talk about an all-time list of popular people on tv without recognizing the name Arthur Godfrey, then yes.
Incidentally, it’s possible to know about stuff that happened before you were around; might want to look into that.
Andy Rooney has done a lot of good reporting in his day. Now, of course, he is in fact a very old, grumpy man who’s out of touch with 21st century life. He could catch up in about an hour if he gave a damn, but I don’t think he does. In any case, we’re all heading that way; Rooney’s lack of awareness of current pop culture is nothing compared to the culture shock we’ve got waiting for us a couple of decades down the road.
The OP is 100% correct, he’s an embarrassment- too pathetic even to watch for cheap laughs. He’s a shriveled old fossil who hasn’t been relevant since the DuMont network was on. The only way he’d be entertaining if he was to have a heart attack on air. Is the 80-89 demographic that important to advertisers that it warrants keeping him?
I remember Arthur Godfrey as being one of the most egotistical bastards that ever lived; I was happy to see the end of the “Old Redhead” as I believe he called himself. But there’s no doubt he was a major power in TV. I think Art Linkletter should have made the list; I’d rate him above Godfrey any day.
And, or what its worth, I have never in my life watched an episode of The Simpsons and probably never will. I never watched an episode of Dallas, either.
Andy Rooney is no idiot, and he knows damn well who Oprah and Homer are. But his whole shtick is to be an old fogey who just doesn’t get the modern world. That’s his act, his gimmick. And if he lost that, became more hip, he’d lose that and his job. And the editors of your paper aren’t idiots either. They know that someone is reading Rooney, even if it’s because there’s nothing else to read in the breakroom at work.
I like Andy Rooney, but I have to agree with the OP. Andy seems more and more lost in the real world like a Mr Magoo with each passing day. And I swear he forgets things he ought to already know about. “I was at the ball game the other day and there was some guy there talking on a telephone - but I couldn’t see any cord! And it didn’t have a dial on it either. I’ll bet he’s one of those guys who drives one of those Japanese cars…what are they called…Tojotos? Hey, does anyone else out there miss the War? Boy, I sure do…Americans pulling together to fight Hitler and Kruschev and hippies…who understands hippies anyhow? The other day I ate at this restaurant - McDonald’s. Normally I don’t go in for ethnic food - give me a steak dinner or lobster thermidor at Delmonico’s - but…”
I imagine he’s rich enough that he has a bevy of handlers and grooms outside of camera range ready to guide him where he needs to go, or respond with rhino-tranqs if he gets out of control.
Never said I was; I just haven’t heard of the guy. I’ve heard of other entertainers who haven’t been all that active since his era, such as Steve Allen - mostly through references on modern shows, but you just don’t hear anyone talk about Godfrey anymore. Or at least I never have.
Sure, he might have been quite popular in his time, but recognition of his name in the popular consciousness doesn’t seem to have survived his show. Similarly, I’m sure that there are more than a few wildly popular entertainers of today who won’t be remembered in forty years except by people who have lived through their heyday, and a few hardcore media buffs.
Heck, I lost all respect for him a while back when he dissed Kurt Cobain (i.e. not buying into any of the hype and excessive news coverage after Cobain killed himself) and somewhere around the same time (a year or so before or after) said women reporters shouldn’t cover football. He later apologized for the first bit but refused to apologize for the second, which is exactly the opposite of what he should have done.
For the record, though, these kinds of lists (in disposable mass-market entertainment-oriented rags) are bad on purpose, because that guarantees heated online discussion, complete with links to the original site (“see here, Entertainment Weekly is the suxxors”), which produces elevated traffic, which increases advertising revenue based on hits. If the list were uncontroversial and sensible, everybody would say, Hey, that sounds good, and that’d be the end of it. Hence, the ridiculous list, whose publication is intended to be only the beginning of its useful existence. EW has one or two of them in every issue.
Now, as far as why Andy Rooney is bad, well, that can be chalked up to antique synapses and an occasionally clogged colostomy outlet. Rather a different story.