On Sept. 11, 2001, TV anchors and pundits announced the death of irony in America. Humor was meaningless. Postmodernism, parody and satire were arrogant drolleries of the irresponsible.
Recent events convinced me that all the obituaries for irony were actually a cover for cable TV news' conversion to a new format--a massive ironic joke that would do any postmodernist proud.
I'd been fooled until just days ago.
On Feb. 25, MSNBC cancelled Phil Donahue's talk show. Donahue was pitched as the liberal answer to the sub-rational stream-of-consciousness bleating of Bill O'Reilly. His show, not peppered with fabricated statistics, was cancelled after six months of poor ratings, possibly stemming from speaking calmly and allowing others to respond.
The gag clicked in my head when MSNBC announced what would take Donahue's place. They are expanding their popular \Countdown: Iraq"" to two hours to fill Phil's spot.
This is a funny premise. A cable network owned partly by massive military contractor General Electric replaces a liberal anti-war voice with a show that, since October, has ""counted down"" to a war that five months later is just as thinly justified as it was when MSNBC revealed how unavoidable they believed a ""regime change"" to be.
That's so sticky with irony, MSNBC has to be lampooning our sadly compromised TV media.
Of course this is a cooperative prank. MSNBC just played this trump card of self-parody to pull weight equal to the incomparably satirical Fox News.
Fox News has shown the ""O'Reilly Factor"" since the ""all-day news"" network's institution in 1996. O'Reilly has staked out comfortable ground in opposition to liberals, feminists and rappers, with an affection for railing on communist sex perverts like Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson.
In response to the post-Sept. 11 discourse, he joked that the United States should starve the Afghans into overthrowing the Taliban (9/19/01). This would violate international law, as pointed out, without realizing O'Reilly was poking fun at anyone cruel enough to advocate civilian starvation.
The funniest part of the show is that he often identifies himself with the working class and calls his show, or apparently the spherical aura around him, the ""no-spin zone.""
Again, before I was hip to the charade I found O'Reilly's fictional ""no-spin zone"" infuriating and his identification with the working class absurd, considering he is a former member of the Republican Party and is a columnist for the surreally conservative And I bet he would be the only working-class dog to ""earn"" a cool couple million last year.
Actually, the title of O'Reilly's show is part of the joke, too. The na??ve public is supposed to try to figure out what the ""factor"" in the ""O'Reilly Factor"" is. Could it be money? Brain damage? Nope--just a good enough sense of humor to parody mean-spirited hyper-conservative talk show hosts.
Man, I can't wait for sweeps week. Maybe by then, MSNBC's ""Hardball"" will have replaced unfunny Chris Matthews with the incomparable G. Gordon Liddy.
dlhinkel@students.wisc.edu.
