Sarah Palin Is Not Funny

Posted at 11:10 AM Oct 20, 2008

By Andy Beckerman

Unfortunately, I didn't not get to see Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live when it aired: I was too busy actually living my life, losers. Ya know, going to the club ripped to the gills on coke, dancing with tons of crazy-hot women, folding my laundry while watching last week's True Blood and then eating a fat-free chocolate pop.

However, thanks to the magic of this device called Computer II ("now with Internet Activation"), I was able to "hone in on" NBC's "webbed-site" with the use of a Uniform Resource Locator and watch til my heart was content, which incidentally was while the video was still loading. But in the interests of journalistic duty, I then forced myself to sit there and watch the Palin sketches, employing one of those devices from A Clockwork Orange to keep my eyes pried open.

As was written about earlier on NCDS after the VP debate, Palin's media performances have fit in quite well with the reigning paradigm of awkward comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office and the granddaddy of them all, the British series Peep Show, a program that is so wince-inducing that my body seizes up grand mal-style while watching. From her catastrophic interviews to her catastrophic photo ops, each new gaffe or desperate attempt to cover up her natural incurious intellectual torpor is met by a national grasping of our kishkas as we yell, "Oy vez mir! A shondah! A shondah!" This performance was no different.

While Palin does possess a practiced political stiffness, perfect for vague rhetoric and race-baiting, this mode of being isn't quite the best one for comedy. That fixed smile haunts while she and Lorne Michaels methodically lay out each line like a session with a speech pathologist. Even-handed and listless, each word drowsily drops with painstaking precision, timed for ultimate nega-yuks (reverse laughter).

Above all though, the biggest problem was not that she's a shitty comedian (that was a given) but rather that her performance humanizes a person who is basically inhuman. It's like those moments on The Sopranos where Tony would hug AJ or show kindness to some ducks: "Look this terribly immoral and brutal oaf isn't completely appalling when, yes, he really was entirely and wholly an ethical void."

I don't want people to root for Palin. I want them to be disgusted by her. I want their gut reaction to be one of massive and unending retching until America is flooded under wave after wave of spontaneous vomit, immersed in a veritable snotgreen and scrotumtightening sea of puke until we drown in our own revulsion, our voices trapped in media res like some kind of upchuck Pompeii. She is the beast; do not look directly into her eyes or we will all perish in flames. Death rides a pale elephant and it will trample us all into flesh fritters! Fuck!