Word: becking
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There's a particular thrill in seeing an amateur attempt your job. Especially when that job is comedy and the amateur is a Fox News personality. So when I heard Glenn Beck was doing a weeklong, six-city Common Sense Comedy Tour, my funniness ranking went up without my having to do anything. Beck, after all, is known for ranting, and sometimes crying, to a massive audience about how our country is approaching the End of Days. This is less the stuff of comedy than the stuff the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives likes to keep tabs...
...part of me felt bad for Beck. Another part wanted to kiss up to a guy with a huge following. And a bigger part of me wanted to see this disaster close-up. So I offered to write some jokes for the show, and Beck accepted. (Read a Q&A with Glenn Beck...
...Beck wrote back that he couldn't use a lot of my material. "If I were to use all of this, I'd be facing this headline the next day, 'Glenn Beck: There are too many things we don't want on our soil ... [such as] Mexicans.' As far as the spelling-bee bit - I'd still be risking the inevitable 'Glenn Beck says Indian children grow up to be failures ... and he says it extra-racistly' headline." ((See the top 10 post-SNL careers...
...Without the freedom to make fun of other ethnicities, I figured, Beck would bomb worse than an Arab in a crowded marketplace. To make sure, I went to one of the 440 movie theaters charging $20 to see a simulcast of Beck's sold-out show from Kansas City, Mo. He opened by looking at the camera and saying, "I particularly want to say hi to the guy from TIME magazine in Burbank, likely all by himself." Which I was. In that there were only 45 people in the audience, and according to actuarial tables, I was likely...
...Beck's material wasn't original - modern art is stupid, consumer-product warning labels are inane - but he is a great performer, flying around the stage and making fun of his profuse sweating and apocalyptic fears. He did an impression of Tim Geithner as an elf from Lord of the Rings and a solid inflation joke about Geithner's being turned away from Antiques Roadshow after bringing a barrel of U.S. dollars. This was much better than my runaway-inflation joke about paying $20 to watch a Glenn Beck concert in a movie theater...