Cynical Cinema

Until the advent of Sarah Palin, with her striking resemblance to Tina Fey and her amazing inability to answer easy questions coherently, the easiest public figure to lampoon was George W. Bush. After all, the man has not only been dangerously inept, historically unpopular, and frighteningly zealous, he has also been incredibly bad at using words to create sentences, which makes him come off as hilariously stupid. Mixed metaphors, mispronounced words, questionable grammar, and a rather poor handle on facts have made the current American President an easy target for comedians and satirists alike. Now Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing an anthology of these humourous looks at a dangerously unqualified man. Comedy Central Salutes George W. Bush hits DVD on October 21st. It’s a collection of George W. Bush related moments from Comedy Central over the past eight years. The past eight long, painful years.

And as it turns out, even with this incredibly easy-to-mock subject matter, the DVD itself manages to be long and painful! It begins well, with an episode of South Park where Cartman blames Kyle for 9/11. Eventually, the boys meet up with Bush and some intriguing yet bonkers conspiracy theories are revealed. A funny episode from a funny show, featuring some genuinely creepy moments involving the Hardy Boys, for some reason. What follows is a sub-par episode from a sub-par show. Lil’ Bush is just not that good. Obviously this disc was going to contain an episode, and in fact it contains two. But there are some episodes of this show that are better than others, and they have chosen two of the worst. For example, why not pick an episode that genuinely lampoons Bush, like the one involving Lil’ Karl Rove? Instead they have chosen an episode that centres around Lil’ Cheney having sex with Barbara Bush and ending up stuck in her womb. Which is just disgusting, not funny at all, and really has little to do with George W.

After sitting through two episodes of Lil’ Bush, one boring and one unpleasant, we get to a truly bizarre show I never knew existed. That’s My Bush is a really strange show lampooning the Bush family in a sit-com style. It’s basically a scenario that asks “what if George W. Bush starred in a sit-com?” It doesn’t really satirize the president, because it doesn’t touch on his policies at all, or his views or his outlook as president. It goes through the motions of a sit-com. Only it stars George Bush and Laura Bush. Get it? I don’t. It’s a satire of sit-coms, not of Bush. In this particular episode, Bush is trying to hold a meeting to unite the leaders of the pro-life movement with the leaders of the anti-abortion movement, all the while attending a nice, sit-down, romantic dinner that he has promised Laura. So he constantly runs back and forth from the dinner to the meeting, and hijinks ensue. Not once do we get any satire on his own personal views on Roe vs. Wade, we just get the sit-com spoof of him switching dinner jackets a bunch of times.

Then there is some respite from the terrible, with an episode of Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, one that pits Paris Hilton against Dick Cheney. A very funny episode, but one that deals only tangentially with Bush himself. Then The Last Laugh Squad, a cartoon featuring Black again, along with some other comics, as they shrink themselves, get into a spaceship, and fly up Bush’s ass. Considering the talent in the episode, this is a pretty poor comedic vehicle. Finally, we get to some stand-up clips from Greg Giraldo, Patton Oswalt, Lewis Black again, and Frank Caliendo doing his Bush impression. Some of this is quite funny, but it’s all too brief, and Carlos Mencia’s bit about Bush being the president of Iraq in 2026 is absolutely awful, and not funny at all. Considering all the fodder Bush has provided Comedy Central over the past eight years, I am sad that this DVD is the best they could manage. They would have done much, much better cobbling together a couple of hours of moments from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and ignoring most of this stuff altogether.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under Lewis Black, Greg Giraldo, Carlos Mencia, Satire, Patton Oswalt, Frank Caliendo, Comedy, TV series, Comedy Central, Garbage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.