At Stephen Colbert’s stop at the Federal Election Commission today, I had the same problem that I usually have at rock concerts, which is that I’m short and have trouble hearing over ambient noise, so I mostly got a look at people in bear masks, and head scarves, and I’m With Coco t-shirts, carrying their copies of I Am America and waving Sanity/Fear frisbees. Fortunately, we have tall interns at the Center for American Progress, and one of them was kind enough to shoot video of Colbert’s speech for me:

Colbert’s speech was pretty standard “Citizens United rules!” parody. It was the kind of crowd that showed up at 4 in the afternoon on Friday because they named their cat Stephen, or because they have a panda suit around for occasions like this, or because DC offices are starting to slouch towards summer hours and why not, right? The best joke in the crowd was probably the person near me who deadpanned “This isn’t the Ron Paul rally?” only to be met with a reply of “This isn’t the Lou Dobbs show.” It was fine, but going on the president’s house and affirming before the nation that he’s a mockery is a stronger comedic speaking of truth to power than asking people to show up and give you money.

I was trying so, so hard to avoid wading into the continuing nonsense of Common’s invitation to the White House, because to acknowledge this nonsense at all is to dignify it in a way it profoundly does not deserve. But now, Bill O’Reilly is flacking an interview with David Jones, the president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association of New Jersey, in which Jones stretches to declare that the Obamas’ invitation represents a profound insult to the widows of law enforcement officers killed on the job and calls Common a “this mutt, this nitwit, complete fraud.” It’s the perfect distillation of what really constitutes the perpetual fight against hip-hop: putting your hands over your ears and substituting insults for the “nya, nya, nya.” Blocking people from the conversation is the most efficient way of avoiding listening to them—particularly when it comes to critiques of law enforcement.

This is why I’m frustrated by the defenses of Common’s invitation on the grounds that he’s a big ol’ teddybear, that he’s Elmo’ friend, that he’s a Christian (albeit one pastored by Jeremiah Wright), that he’s in Gap ads, that he’s as bland a representation of hip-hop as we can possibly get. That doesn’t really win us this battle, it doesn’t deter people like Jones. And it sets us up to lose the next fight, when we want to see someone invited to the White House who doesn’t meet our own narrow and self-defeating definition of acceptability.

Poets aren’t politicians, and that means they often play their most valuable role in expanding the debate by being off-message. Murdering cops isn’t actually an appropriate response to police brutality or an effective way to stop it, but that doesn’t actually make the grief and rage at the end of “Cop Killer” any less legitimate. Do I wish “Fuck Tha Police” didn’t have the lines “I’m a sniper with a hell of a scope / Takin out a cop or two, they can’t cope with me” or “Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got? / A sucka in a uniform waitin’ to get shot”? Yeah, but that doesn’t make the song any less ferocious or funny, or take away the economy and power of the bald statement that “police think / They have the authority to kill a minority.” It’s easy for people who don’t want to reckon with that to move to exclude the whole song, a whole pantheon of artists from the realms of discussion. It’s a lot harder to simultaneous critique of the worst in hip-hop while forcefully arguing for the inclusion of the whole, but that doesn’t mean it’s strategic to go the easiest route.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Earlier in the week, commenter martinhduke said in the discussion of why 30 Rock has gone downhill that part of the reason the show is in trouble is that:

Liz as straight man anchored the show in the early seasons. I think it also arises from Fey becoming a little more comfortable with acting as the years passed, so that she shifted from playing herself to a more outrageous character. Unfortunately, “Tina Fey” is a much more compelling character than late-season Liz Lemon.

I think that’s true. And I thought that last night’s episode of Parks and Recreation was a great illustration of how that show has become better than 30 Rock in part by being unafraid to treat Leslie Knope like she’s attractive. It turns out a drunk Amy Poehler commanding someone to “dance up on me” walks a very funny line between slight ridiculousness and total plausibility:

But more importantly, treating Leslie if she’s attractive yields more potential plot lines and more kinds of jokes than treating Liz Lemon as if she’s a freak of nature. If Liz is an utter disaster, every relationship story has to end the same way, with her doing something weird, or awkward, or distasteful. No matter how baroque the details are, and they have gotten baroque, the story’s always essentially the same. But because Leslie’s attractive, the writers can focus on the actual dynamics of her relationships and tell different kinds of stories. Tina Fey may have given in and embraced the idea that Liz Lemon crazy by her own definition, “a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” But it’s a lot more fun to watch Poehler beat back the point at which Leslie will be declared crazy by solidly establishing that people still want to fuck her.

People may complain that he’s a professional buffoon, or that it’s a bit boring to honor two comedians with similar trajectories two years in a row, but I must say, I’m rather happy that Will Ferrell will be receiving this year’s Mark Twain Prize for Humor. Ferrell has a lot of mediocre projects on his resume—Semi-Pro and Blades of Glory strike me as particularly unnecessary, and I say that as someone who paid to see both movies in theaters—but he’s an extraordinarily funny broad comedian. And I think increasingly, he’s taking on projects that showcase his ability to quiet all the way down and very productively create space for people to be funny around him.

Stranger than Fiction is a wonderful example of that: Ferrell is as straight a straight man as possible as an IRS auditor who discovers that he also happens to be a character in a novel Emma Thompson is writing, and that when she kills him off in the story, he’ll probably die in real life. It’s almost jarring to watch him in a scene like this one, where he’s awkwardly funny like a normal person, as opposed to uproarious:

An even better example is the scene where Dustin Hoffman asks Ferrell a series of questions designed to determine what kind of story he’s in, and a bewildered Ferrell tries to provide honest answers to increasingly baroque queries, ending in “Aren’t you relieved to know you’re not a Golem?” Ferrell is entirely reactive in the scene, and his escalating confusion only serves to make Hoffman funnier. It’s easy to forget that being a good straight man is as much of a skill as being a wild man. I haven’t seen Everything Must Go yet, but Ferrell has talked about how much he loved making Stranger Than Fiction, and how he saw Everything Must Go as a similar project, which strikes me as a good sign.

I’m not saying Ferrell should give up playing fast, loose, and out of control. The world would be a poorer place without Anchorman or Old School—another one of Ferrell’s singular talents is to play manchildren in a way that’s a very funny critique of men who resist adulthood, in contrast to Judd Apatow’s gentler treatment of less-exaggerated characters. But I can see why he’d get tired of the expectation that he’s always in Wild and Crazy Guy mode, and audiences are cheating themselves if that’s all they’re able to tolerate from him.