It's Not Enough to Shoot Fish in a Barrel...

By all measures I give Comedy Central shows far more consideration than they deserve. Outside of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, there are far more misses than there are hits. Even, to me, South Park is spotty, though I do enjoy Reno 911 and The Sarah Silverman Show.

Actually, that's not bad for one network.

Anyway.

No doubt conservatives are whining about Li'l George. I can tell them right now they can relax. If anything it proves that it's not enough to just make fun of GW Bush, it has to be funny, and man does this show not deliver.

In some confusing hybrid world, George Senior is in charge, but we're still in our current war. Li'l George runs around with equally bad caricatures of Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld.

They are characterized with such 'insightful' strokes as Cheney mumbling/growling out indistinguishable sounds marked with key Cheney quotes while the people who he's talking to interpret as brutal suggestions. Just a note, self-effacing Jon Stewart occasionally doing Penguin imitations when talking about Cheney is funny, the cut rate Evil Kenny, not so much. Having Cheney's father being Darth Vader is less than one note.

Rumsfeld is of course abused by his father.

Rice is naturally in love with Bush. This wasn't funny when it was Janet Reno and Clinton (and at least Clinton had the ladies man rep) and it's not funny here. As usual for the cartoon style they're using, Rice is the smartest of the group, but this is of course blinded by her love for Bush.

Tonight's episode of course used "Li'l Blair" to imply the British are homosexual in a half assed attempt to parody the Bush administration's homophobia. Ultimately it boils down to little other than "Ha ha, the Bush administration hates gays." We know. You have to try harder (they even missed opportunities to play with hypocrisy and tough situations with Cheney, instead having him follow Barrack Obama when George is off playing with Blair, making Obama interchangeable with Carter...)

Nothing about this show digs deeper than a surface level understanding of the situation. Truth be told the humor wouldn't be affected if the connection to the real life characters wasn't there, which is to say that it still wouldn't be funny. There is no insight to it, it's no more insulting than a fifth grader calling a sixth grader stupid.

What it comes down to is satire is hard, even when what you're satirizing seems like an easy subject. And this phoned in attempt does not succeed. The sad thing is that given divided world we live in a crappy show of this nature actually ends up reflecting bad on me and others who put a little effort in making fun of this administration.