Todd Levin

Holy cow:

In the interest of being Fair and Balanced (copyright 2008), I should also point out that Senator Obama made a similarly grim appeal on Last Comic Standing this week. I should, but I won’t because McCain’s video is the one that should really be seen for its comedic value. After all, it was McCain himself who said his attack ads comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton (topical!), Britney Spears (fresh!), Moses (classic!) and, if you listen to people who understand language coded for evangelical Christians, The Dark Prince (batdance!), were all meant to “inject some humor into the campaign.” (And yes, I put those quotes around his statement even though it is a paraphrase. Thank you, Internet’s Zero Accountability.) As such, I’m going to assume McCain is the candidate who knows his way around a hilarious (spurious, apocalyptic) joke.

First of all, I have seen more natural, less coerced looking televised performances from Al Qaeda hostages. Maybe this was deliberate and McCain is trying to signal his superior officers to let them know he’s being held captive by an over-laughing publicist, but I can’t say for sure because my skills as a voice and body language interpreter are about as official as the presidential seal on the podium in this video. (Chances that one hour before this was taped a production assistant ordered to “find a can of brown paint to cover up the “Tic-Tac-Dough” logo on that podium, or I’ll have you late-term aborted!!” are exactly one million to yes.)

Also, did someone’s cat fall asleep on the sound effects console? Or did someone at LCS–that’s industry lingo for Last Comic Standing–painstakingly and judiciously decide “old fashioned jalopy horn = Reagan” and “boner popping = Bush?” I do kind of hope a producer was standing over a sound technician, saying, “wait, wait…try ‘Slide Whistle Down’. Hmm…maybe that’s too poignant. Lemme hear ‘Pig Farts Inside Log’. Great, put that in the ‘maybe’ folder.” But I also hope that same producer heard the sound of his own voice during these proceedings and, in a moment of clarity, without saying another word to anyone, placed his clipboard on a console, exited the studio, drove to the airport, and booked a direct flight to Darfur to perform volunteer relief work for the next five years. Oh, and I think I can be of some assistance to McCain. When you wondered out loud who called you “funny looking” (punchy!), had you considered it might have been the DJ, since the barb was immediately preceded by the sound of a needle scratching across a record? Elementary, sir.

Not that it has anything to do with electability (a subject McCain knows a great deal about), but if Obama lacked the good sense to refuse this comedic showcase outright, at least he had the decent sense to make it quick. Compare that to McCain, who wrote a tight fifteen, and then blew the light anyway.

(Vicious and superfluous ad hominem attack: has anyone else noticed that, as McCain continues to age horribly before our very eyes, he has taken on the appearance of a man who was carved from snow? If you look closely at the buttons on his suit, I think you’ll see they’re made out lumps of coal. FREEZER BURN!)