This is an experimental interactive
Wessay™. It’s to help you watch pre-election television, become your own
executive producer and cable news talking head.
Context: In the early days of TV comedy, they
used “laugh tracks” to aurally decorate where they wanted you to laugh.
The theory says if you hear laughter, you’ll laugh along. It worked
pretty well for a long time.
We need to revive the practice. Not for TV
comedy, but for TV politics.
Now, the interactive part. Here is the
results page from a Google search for Audience Reaction Sound Effects and if it doesn’t show properly, you can do
your own by using the same search term.
What you will find is laughter, applause,
cheers, jeers, boos, shock, awe, love, hate, and every other reaction. You will
find catfights, howling dogs and wolves, trumpeting elephants, rimshots,
explosions, tornadoes at play and the hoofbeats of a cattle riot.
From this collection, you can make your own
playlist, put it on your iPhone, turn on Fox News and fill your room with
laughter. It may lighten your mood but it won’t do much good…
Unless. Unless you spread the idea, with
or without the medium-tech tools now at your disposal.
Make trump into the joke he is.
Weaponize laughter.
When the “president” speaks about his fake
accomplishments, don’t get mad. Don’t get even. Get laughing. It’s not
going to change him. But maybe it will change those he depends on for his
dictatorship of the reality show. And you can spread the practice to members of
your own social circle.
Each one teach one? That often works. This
is a variation of that. And there’s a nice little irony in this fire. The
concept of weaponized laughter first came to the attention of many when it was
written about extensively by the Grandma of Modern Fake Conservativism, Ayn
Rand. Not that she was a big fan of people like Nixon and Reagan. To
paraphrase: “laugh them out of the house.”
Think of trump and Pence as Abbott and Costello
or Toody and Muldoon or Cheech and Chong, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler or Key and
Peele. For more spice, make it a threesome by adding Bill Barr and thinking of
them as Larry, Moe and Curley.
Notes From All Over:
(NEW YORK) -- the NY Times has started a series
of articles about trump’s taxes, something we’ll eventually deal with here in
detail. Summary in a sentence: If you did what he did when and how he did
it, you would already be eligible for parole.
(WASHINGTON) -- The race is on and Amy Coney
Barrett will win because she’s running the track alone. We can’t wait for the
swearing in as associate justice of the Supreme Court, and her first opinion
written in tongues.
TODAY’S QUOTE: “Truth will always matter.” -- Shep Smith, who
begins his new TV job at CNBC tonight almost a year after becoming persona non
grata and Fox News.
Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2020
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