The Daily Late Show (National Razor)

Sam Bee moves to Wednesday next week so that she has a couple of days to encapsulate the debate which will start at 9 pm Monday and last for 90 painful minutes or so. Fly away races and seasonal change have sucked out my sense of humor, nothing seems very funny at the moment except the Labour Leadership race which is not so much amusing as tragically ironic as professional politicians scramble to insulate themselves from the constituents they owe their jobs, allowing them to continue that great democratic tradition of selling out to the highest bidder and telling their voters to sod off.

Perhaps Sunday when the tumbrels start to roll I’ll feel better about things, though I doubt it. Even a best case scenario is two more years of looting and betrayal by people who’s mercenary and mendacious denial of reality will try to drown us all in the vomitous falsehood that Neoliberal policies work for any one or anything except their paymasters (who don’t benefit much either except for a sense of smug self righteousness and superiority).

Jon Stewart resigned, Trump is a joke and Larry Wilmore got canceled: Understanding the power of political satire this election
by Sophia A. McClennen, Salon
Tuesday, Sep 20, 2016 06:00 AM EST

(T)he real political power of satire today is aimed less at specific candidates and more at the system that lets that candidate rise.

It would be hard to find a more politically passionate satirist than Lee Camp, whose “Redacted Tonight” on RT America continues to build a growing audience. Camp is an excellent example of an activist comedian and he’s been referred to as “Jon Stewart with teeth.” His shows are as much about exposing news and information that’s been “redacted” from public discourse as they are about being funny.

But the key is that Camp has focused his satire during this election on the rigged system and the corporatocracy. That has meant that he has gone after Trump and Hillary Clinton in equal measure, reserving some of his most vicious attacks for the corruption in the Democratic National Committee. Camp’s comedy has proved that some of the most interesting satire of this election cycle has focused less on the personalities and more on the system that produced two of the least liked candidates in our nation’s history.

The other trick for understanding the comedy landscape during this election cycle is that we have to distinguish between satire and mockery. Satire is a politically incisive form of comedy that’s meant to shake your perceptions, unmask abuses of power and call attention to the way we accept the absurd as the everyday.
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Late-night comedy is populated by both frat-boy-type humor and politically edgy humor but they are not the same and don’t yield the same results. Silly comedy is funny but has little, if any, political impact; political comedy is often more cerebral and more powerful in changing the way the audience thinks.

And that is, of course, part of why we lost Larry Wilmore’s “The Nightly Show.” Looking beyond its ratings struggles, one finds that its comedy became less in sync with some of the silliness that attracts audiences on other late-night shows. Wilmore’s show, though, was the one source of political comedy that consistently exposed systemic racism, sexism and xenophobia.

It’s fun to imagine that Wilmore could have built the same sort of following as Colbert did in the same time slot, but he simply wasn’t given the time or the resources to do so. Despite the fact that we have ample sources of satire from a range of media sources, the show’s cancellation remains a huge loss.
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The real battle during this election, though, isn’t between Trump and Clinton; it’s between delusion and sanity, between lies and reality. No matter who wins in November, this nation is going to have to deal with a huge reality check. And that’s why we can thank the satirists for being the consistent sources of reason in a field dominated by farce.

Things that didn’t suck