The low point in the low point laden history of Saturday Night Live just have been the 1995-1996 season.  It was a season between two “epocah” casts — or to put another way, two Bill Clinton impersonators.  The lowest moment might have been this single sketch — Jeff Daniels was interviewed on a movie review show, and a single clip from “Dumb and Dumber” — where Daniels is on the toilet — is shown over and over and over again, and over and over and over again, and over and over and over again.

Chris Elliott was a cast member that season.  I read parts of the oral history Live from New York, so know Chris Elliott’s thoughts on his stint at Saturday Night Live.  It was the low point of his career, and he was out of sorts there.  He and a couple of other mismatched cast members formed a bit of a bond to endure the season — Jeanine Garaolo managed to get out of the last few episodes, something which I am sure Chris Elliott would have done if he were able to do.  Years later, the obviousness of just how mismatched Chris Elliott was becomes ever more acute.  Why did Lorne Michaels, or anyone else on the show, think he fit this show?

At the time I watched a bit wearily, and had the vcr ready to record.  All in all, there were three or four sketches that struck as belonging to Chris Elliott.  Tellingly, in Central Central’s shortened re-runs, they were cut out.  I’m not entirely sure if one of the bits survived the rerun redactions — George Foreman reading to Chris Elliott “Good Night Moon” — was that one ran?  (I guess now we’ll never know.  Comedy Central has moved on from stacking its schedule with SNL reruns.)

I’ll mention two other other sketches — I suppose to be inserted into the long-delayed “Best of Chris Elliott” edition of a SNL collection.  There’s this one where Elliott is taking a survey at the new Denver Airport to guage opinions on a possible new opinion — a Penis Extender.  This is not an especially remarkable sketch, except that it’s basically a set up for Elliott to break the fourth wall, declare that he’s quitting the show to work on such devices for “The Future” — and walks out… Lorne Michaels and — um… John Connaly (?) in tow.  To the groans of the audience who knows where this is going, with Chris Elliott being assassinated.

The other sketch, I am a fan of, and quite possibly the only fan on the face of the Earth.  It is a bit which was the perfect display and demonstration of just why Chris Elliott probably should not have been on Saturday Night Live.  Chris Elliott is a novelty gag store owner, and so has one customer after another coming in to ask for a classic novelty gag or other — Chris Farley comes in asking for some fake vomit, for instance.  Chris Elliott has to forlornly explain that his store does not carry such things — that this is a “Funny Strange” store, and not a “Funny Ha Ha” store, but they do have — say, a file full of Insect Vomit.  When asked then where they go to get fake vomit or a whoopie cushion or chattering teeth, Chris Elliott has to wearily give directions to a different store across town.  In the end, Chris Elliott closes up the store, groaning about how lousy business is, and in walks his identical twin brother to gloat about how terrific business is going at his “Funny Ha Ha” business.  Angry, Chris Elliott strangles his more successful and mainstream identical twin brother to death, next there’s a dramatic close up of chattering teeth, and a pointless add on from Kevin Nealon and his identical twin.  I think the studio audience was more puzzled by this than anything else — though I guess it could fit as a highlight on an SNL collection of sketches of the sort inserted as the second to last bit, ready to be cut if need — right next to your “Big Ear Family”s or whatnot.

It should be noted that the infamous Dumb and Dumber toilet clip sketch was on the Comedy Central reruns.  But I suppose there’s not too much confusion on the bit.

Today, Abby Elliott is a Saturday Night Live cast member, and the New York Times Magazine ran a story about the Elliott Comedy family tree.  Some things pop out in this NY Times article.  It appears that a secret to Abby Elliott’s success lies somewhere with the fact that she has made a relative break from the comedy traditions of Bob and Chris Elliott.  See:

What Chris did on Letterman’s show “wasn’t an attempt at a mainstream type of comedy,” Adam Resnick, who wrote with Chris in those years, told me. “Chris on Letterman was abrasive. That was part of the joke. If you weren’t smart enough to get it, you’d hate him.”

Of course, the price a performer pays for causing part of the audience to hate him is reduced popularity. “I think he has a really powerful legacy to live up to,” says Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” where Chris worked as a writer and performer during the 1994-95 season (he and Abby are the show’s first parent-child cast members). “When you grow up around show business and you’re determined to have some notion of integrity. . . .” He paused, then finished the thought: “There are so many easy ways to hack out. I think he was so rigorous that he would quite often not want to do things that might have made the audience like him more, because he would have thought it was false.”

Chris acknowledged the audience’s ambivalent feelings toward him every time he walked out on Letterman’s stage. He’d take huge sweeping bows and blow kisses to the audience as if he were a Judy Garland impersonator at a gay-pride concert instead of a guy whom half the audience found simply puzzling — making a joke of the fact that some people didn’t think he was funny.

And compare that to the Abby Elliott’s approach to comedy…

After 35 years, the humor of “Saturday Night Live” has long since become the norm, and Abby has not had the opportunity, or inclination, to display the kind of audience-confounding humor that her father and grandfather often favored. “I want to make people laugh,” she says, “and making a lot of people laugh on TV is amazing. If I want to do something superweird and out there, I’ll do it for an audience of 30 people drinking beers at U.C.B.”

And really the “Funny Strange” sketch resembles nothing but a metaphor for his own frustrations on SNL.  Subconscious or not , I do not know.

………………………………………

One odd last note about this quasi-accusation — somewhat worth mentioning from the NY Times article by way of suggestion:

By this time, Chris was ready to enter show business himself. “I can’t remember wanting to do anything else,” he told me (he did toy briefly with the idea of becoming a professional hockey player, he said, “but I never learned how to skate”). Seeing no need for college, he got a job as a tour guide at Rockefeller Center, where David Letterman, before “Late Night” but already a successful comedian, showed up one day with his mother to show her the observation deck. Because he was with a parent, Chris sold Letterman a reduced-price child’s ticket. “He giggled,” Chris recalls, “and walked to the back of the elevator. That’s the cool part of the story. The uncool part is I blurted out who my dad was. He said, ‘I’ve always tried to get your dad on when I host the “Tonight Show” for Johnny Carson.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah, he doesn’t do the show unless Johnny’s hosting.’ ” Which, according to Chris, “kind of weirded Dave out.”

Chris Elliott was hired as a gopher at the start of Late Night with Letterman’s run — which morphed into his reoccuring appearances.  And it is worth mentioning that Bob Elliott was a guest on Letterman within the first two weeks.  Add two and two together, and perhaps Chris Elliott was in the position of doing Letterman a favor with that one?

“So, I turned in a paper about Slavery from women’s perspective, and”

I did not quite catch the next line or so, as I was not evesdropping per se, paying no rapt attention or mind.  But I thought I caught “and in the margins, he wrote ‘[blah bleh blah].”

“[Loud Gasp].  He wants you SO BADLY.”

If I were drinking anything at that moment I would have done the classic spit take.  That was not a response I was expecting to hear to the rather quiet discussion of a college student’s essay response.  I turned my head over, wondering about the protocol for inappropriate sexual advances from college professors or student aides, and saw — to my relief, that there were two conversations going on between two different pairs of undergraduate late teen early twenty something year old women, and the horrifying possibility of a suggestive  s and m comment to a paper regarding  to a “woman’s perspective on slavery” could respectfully be shoveled out of my head.

When I passed by a few minutes on my way out, the two who were discussing sex were doing so in hushed tones, evidentally aware loudly gasping “He wants you SO BADLY” cannot help but draw attention.

I linked to a page and pointed out this banner in my last post, but these things will be wasted unless I point to it a bit further.

Huh?

What does this mean?  This thing is confusing to me.  When I hear the phrase “Enemies of the People”, I think of the Soviet Union’s dissidents.  Which, generally speaking, would be a good thing.  That would seem to suggest that the original source for this image — Republican or conservative activist — is viewing themselves and his/her movement as a Soviet, sharpening discipline, and calling out Obama, Pelosi, Holder, Napolitano, Rangel, Reid, Frank, and Dodd as “Enemies of the People”.

Or is s/he implying that the eight headed Soviet Politboro of Obama, Pelosi, Holder, Napolitano, Rangel, Reid, Frank, and Dodd are listing out the “Enemies of the People”?  I guess that would make some sense — but I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to double back to thinking of them as the “Enemies of the People”, which leads to perhaps a commentary about the double-edged sword — we become the enemy we fight — or something about projection — or perhaps a statement that we choose sides and really only have one choice because both sides are the same.

We’re in the “Hit a Day” period of Senate grandstanding, thrown out for the blogosphere’s dining enjoyment.  The Big item two days ago was Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, having the Bernie Sanders 767 page “Single Payer” Amendment read out loud.  It was a delaying tactic, and I suppose a good enough one — but really, I am thinking that there ought be a rule that when such a request is made, the Senator should not be allowed out of the room — if Coburn wants the Amendment read, he should required to have to remain in the chambers and listen to it.  Maybe this rule change should be put into effect at the start of the next Congress — play by ear in the current Era of Hyper-Partisanship, all these things go about in flux.

Yesterday, we had a great curfunkle between Al Franken, Joseph Lieberman, John McCain, and an assist from Carl Levine.  Lieberman over-stepped his ten minutes, Al Franken — presiding over the chambers– shut him down, Lieberman asked for an extra minute, and Franken denied the request.  McCain stepped in to proclaim outrage.

MCCAIN: I’ve never seen a member denied an extra minute or so, as the chair just did.

SEN. CARL LEVIN (D-MI): If the chair would yield for that…I think the same thing did occur earlier this afternoon, for reasons which have to do with trying to get this bill going. […]

MCCAIN: I think it harms the comity of the Senate.

Curiously, I would have to think a surer sign of the comity’s demise was shown with the previous day’s antics.

In other news, “Tea Party”ers perking up when Lieberman held out to drop the Medicare buy-in proposal are angered that once that was done in, he’s spoken for the Bill.  They’ve now circled their wagons to Ben Nelson, and Jim Demint is buttering him up.  Also, the conservative blogosphere continues to use the name “Stuart Smalley” instead of “Al Franken”.

In the Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” buzz about Ben Bernanke…

That kind of doesn’t interest me so much as the “Conceptual” slot into runner up – The “Chinese Worker”.

In China they have a word for it. baoba means “protect eight,” the 8% annual economic growth rate that officials believe is critical to ensuring social stability. A year ago, many thought hitting such a figure in 2009 was a pipe dream. But China has done it, and this year it remains the world’s fastest-growing major economy — and an economic stimulus for everyone else. Who deserves the credit? Above all, the tens of millions of workers who have left their homes, and often their families, to find work in the factories of China’s booming coastal cities — in plants like the Shenzhen Guangke Technology Co.’s, just outside Hong Kong, which sits amid a jumble of snack stands, cheap clothing stalls and old men dragging carts filled with candy to sell to workers on their day off.

Glory Be!

Then again, the laudatory Ben Bernanke piece has an odd ring to it itself:

… Hm.

Grade school kid draws this stick figure cross figure.  The teacher sends the kid to the school psychiaritrist, seeing it as a kid burdened with a Persecution Complex swarming with resentments.  The father throws out a gripe of Religious Persecution — the kid drew Jesus on the Cross, for Pete’s Sake!

It is one of those stories that I can’t help but note and pause for a second.  I haven’t quite a handle on this.  Why would this be enough to warrent a psychological evaluation?  If isolated, I can’t think it fits, if part of a larger pattern of sudden shifts into severe despondency — maybe.

So the easy answer is to suggest that everyone over-reacted slightly, and regret the fact that this has riven its way into a small amount of national conciousness — I mean, this is a diversionary story from what we should be following by way of the Culture Wars: every shift and turn in the “Meep Ban” story –  and that the father looks the most inane — see this quotation:  “It hurts me that they did this to my kid,” Chester Johnson, the boy’s father, told the Globe. “They can’t mess with our religion; they owe us a small lump sum for this.”  You will forgive me for wondering about his real motivation — the “relgious persecution” angle is dissipating — it is enough to make me line up and demand Tort Reform against Frivulous lawsuits.

The thing becomes a little bit muddled.  A middle school art teacher once told me the story of how she wearily forbid her class from depictions of killing dead people in an art assignments, only to regret doing so because it gave her demented students the idea of handing in an armful of mutilated animal depictions.  But that becomes a problem of crudity — there was no particular imagination in the middle school students’ tormentations to her teacher. In the grade school students’ case and his either persecution complex or Jesusy way — with his money grubbing father — I would prefer some allowance for an expression in art along the lines of John Lennon’s Beatles lyrics ” Christ you know it ain’t easy, you know how hard it can be.  The way things are going They’re going to crucify me.” Though, I suppose nothing works in a vacuum, and the teacher will be scratching his or her head wondering who’s doing the persecution.  Maybe better to go the “You load sixteen tons an’ what do you get?  Another day older and deeper in debt.” route as a statement against homework.

After all the hub and ub, the Obama Administration, the 60 seat Democratic Senate, and the 40 some Democratic Congressional Majority margin is about to pass…

Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts state Health Care bill from a few years’ back.  This is where Joseph Lieberman’s desire to subtract has gotten us — back over to individual mandates with welfare subsidies at the lower income range and sans any cost levelling device (what the “Government Mandate” was supposed to be), or expansion of Medicare (with a high deductable).  Two things to recall from Romney’s great adventure: first, Ted Kennedy was standing right next to him on that one, and secondly — well, Romney represented the right-edge of a Republican bullwark against a liberal Democratic Massachusetts legislator — I don’t quite know what to express Obama as in relation to his Congress.

… Maybe somewhere in the Obama / Emanuel / Lieberman axis of Legislative Political Effect against Policy?

A few points need to be made on Lieberman’s place in the Lieberman – Landrieu – Lincoln – Nelson group.  In addition to the “Spite” angle, and the “Keep myself relevant” angle of Lieberman’s motivations, there is something in the breakdown of the party system, as against — say — Licoln.  Blanche Lincoln has a self preservation interest in a successful Obama presidency — even if the other part of her equation, separate herself from him — is at odds and undermines that interest.  It is the act of swimming in a electorate stream for re-election with an Obama at a 40 percent approval rating in Arkansas as against an Obama at a 30 percent approval rating.  Lieberman, meanwhile, has a self interest in a failed Obama presidency — a Republican president elected in 2012 would tap him into his cabinet, and he can continue grand-standing in the Zell Miller tradition.

That is the problem of relaying on a process of 60 votes to pass through anything.  In a previous blog post, I  Monday Morning quarterbacked the Democrats to could have should have (would have?) changed the rule at the start of 2007 — when the effect was in the distance and beyond immediate fights.  Though, then we may just see Conservative Dems come out of the woodwork to do what it currently takes all of one Lieberman to do — curb the liberals to get the “only thing non-negotiable” is to sign something.

There we see the other end of the Case against the Political Ideolouges of Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul — fighting as they do for narrowly defined principles as against narrowly defined political effect.  Funny thing here — as we see Howard Dean bleat about, having argured for passing what parts can be passed through this process and some parts passed through Reconciliation (which, I guess, would require some gimmick to seperate it in the minds of the 60 vote requirers) — and who knows what the effectiveness of the Dean strategum would have been — but he would represent the center point against the Obama / Emanuel / Lieberman political effect versus Ron Paul / Dennis Kucinich Ideologue hunter… though, at this point, everything gets drowned from him down to “Kill the Bill”.  Then again, Dean has other priorities of policy than Obama.

I am not being original here in echoing out Joseph Lieberman’s perdifidy.  (And if you want to know why I insist on using a mis-spelling and comical exaggeration of the word, look at the google search.)  I mean to say not perfidy to the cause of Liberal or Progressive or Democratic Policy, but to consistency of principles of policy.

The sentence that irks a bit is this one said on the Sunday Morning talk-haze.:

“We’ve got to stop adding to the bill. We’ve got to start subtracting some controversial things.”

Followed by the call for bi-partisanship — and this next sentence is kind of non-sensical —  I think the only way to get this done before Christmas is to bring in some Republicans who are open-minded on this, like Olympia Snowe.  — in large part because Olympia Snowe is the only name that one can possibly come up with here.

The problem is the subtracted the “Public Option” (which, at the point it came to the Senate, was not worth defending anyways), and then added the “Medicare Buy-in”, with the reasonable guess that it could pass Joseph Lieberman’s muster.  What might lead a person to reasonably conclude it could?  Because of previous proposals from Joseph Lieberman.

The video presents the puzzling case of media malfeasance, as shown in this round out of a tv appearance yesterday.

And, answering the most widespread criticism of late–that he switched stances on the Medicare buy-in provision, which he supported during the 2000 presidential campaign.

That… can not be the “most widespread criticism”.  Can it?  I am more concnerned from his switched psoition from 3 months ago — which, incidentally, he has since addressed in part by parsing the differences of the moment and the political feasibles of what can be stopped — and in part by pointing out that Anthony Weiner and other liberals liked the new policy.

The principles of the man blow me away.