Dave’s bad joke: Making a mountain out of a kerfuffle

So I watched Letterman tonight because I heard he was going to offer up an apology for the Sarah-Palin-and-her-kids joke he told last week. Actually, I TiVo Letterman every night and watch it the next day while I work. Here is the apology:



I’ve noticed that Letterman’s monologues are constructed differently than other late-night comedians’. He uses the same set-up every night for a week or two – about the weather, about Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street bail-out, whatever’s in the news – and follows it up with a different lame punchline. I used to get confused and think I was watching a show I’d already seen till I figured out his rhythm. With his monologue, it’s not about the punchline, it’s about the set-up. He gets a bigger laugh from the nightly-repeated set-up than he does the phoned-in punchline that follows.

Lately, A-Rod has become one of his stock running gags. I guess this A-Rod person is some NYC sports celebrity caught up in a scandal, I think going back to when he was apparently dating Madonna. Every A-Rod joke is about how if he’d ‘hit’ Madonna, he’d screw anything that wasn’t nailed down.

Enter Sarah Palin. As Letterman explained during tonight’s mea culpa, the joke he told – about Sarah Palin and one of her daughters going to a Yankees game and the daughter getting knocked up by A-Rod during the seventh-inning stretch – was designed to make hay out of the fact that both A-Rod and Sarah Palin’s older daughter are notorious for their promiscuity. Palin’s older daughter, knocked up at 17, has since gone on publicity junkets where she talked to the press and schoolkids about her teenage pregnancy experience (the Scared Flaccid tour). So by any reasonable standard, the 18-year-old Ms Palin has made herself a public personality, thus fair game to the kind of comedic scrutiny to which she has since been subjected.

Problem is, it turned out it wasn’t Sarah Palin’s legal-age, new-mama daughter who accompanied her to the game Dave referenced, it was her 14-year-old. It downgraded a lame gag to a tasteless misfire, but that’s really all I felt it did.

Then the Palin political machine got involved and decided to milk Letterman’s faux pas for all it was worth. Determined to keep her name in the headlines or her dunderhead fan-base might forget what a great rack she has by 2012, Gov. Palin went on a finger-pointing tour of the media, who were of course only too eager to lap it up and help her spread her disingenuous shit around. It was a calculated and conniving decision to repeatedly use her 14-year-old daughter, in a sexual context, to promote her political ambitions. Despicable. I mean, she went on the friggin’ Today Show and flat-out accused Dave Letterman of starting a second life at 62 as a pedophile. Who, I thought, besides crazy fringe-dwellers is going to buy this transparent line of shit?

I was surprised and disappointed at how many seemed to. The GOP’s leading intellectual light, Rush Limbaugh, says uglier things – on purpose! – every thirty seconds on his wildly popular radio show five days a week. Who can forget his hilarrrrious impression of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinsons symptoms? Where was Gov. Palin’s righteous indignation then?

But I digress...

As I mentioned at the top of this piece, Letterman’s monologue jokes seem deliberately designed to be self-deprecating clunkers. But they’re not designed to be nonsensical, which the joke – as interpreted by right-wing bloviators and a compliant media – would have been if he had been cracking wise about Palin’s relatively low-profile 14-year-old, instead of the 18-year-old-tabloid-sensation-with-child. Even Sarah Palin isn’t thick-witted enough to not grasp the factual error that led Letterman’s joke off a cliff, but she’s plenty savvy enough to know when a celebrity has stepped on his own dick in a way that will not only keep her name in the headlines a little longer, but in a sympathetic light for a change. Hell, even old-school left-wingnuts N.O.W. took the bait and threw in with her. The Palins must have gotten quite a kick out of that.

So after agonizing over the media grilling he took all weekend, Dave devoted his entire second segment tonight to an apparently heart-felt apology (top) to all Palins everywhere as well as anybody out there who had genuinely bought the spin on this story (not just used it to further their presidential aspirations). If he was faking his remorse, his next Emmy nomination ought to be in an acting category, not variety show host.

All that remains now is to watch how Gov. Palin and her enablers – uh, I mean handlers – continue to plumb the depths of human depravity to flog yet more mileage out of this embarrassing episode, even after Letterman’s anguished apology.

Drill, baby, drill!