"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, October 26, 2018

News Satire Roundup: October 23rd-October 25th


Tuesday, October 23 – Clip show week.  Today’s theme was Trump’s dubious international relations.  We hit on Europe:  his bromance with Macron, advising Spain to “build a wall” across the Sahara Desert, and the many ways he insulted the queen while visiting the U.K. (I still love Gina’s commentary on this story.)  We had a bit of Africa, with him revisiting the theme, if not the vulgarity, of the “shithole countries” thing with the president of Nigeria.  We touched on the Middle East, with him threatening war with both Syria and Iran over Twitter.  We looked at other parts of Asia – a bit on his belief in Chinese election hacking and a lot on the summit with North Korea.  Finally we returned to the photo of him pouting in front of various world leaders at the U.N. summit.  Trump complains about the rest of the world laughing at America, but a great deal of that is down to him.

Wednesday, October 24 – What’s interesting about this “Trump-free” episode is that it pretty much entirely consists of two kinds of stories:  short opening blurbs and stories from the correspondents (either field reports or desk pieces.)  Does that mean every significant main story from the recent past has been wrapped up in Trump?  Depressing.  But, that means this episode featured a lot of quick-joke pieces:  an African immigrant who saved a baby in France, a guy clinging to the hood of his car while his ex was stealing it, Bert & Ernie’s relationship status (“That eyebrow would’ve been addressed by now!”), dumb remarks from a racist superintendent, and the KKK trying to recruit with candy.  For correspondent pieces, we had Ronny on rich folks with chicken coops (“You like chickens?  Well, fuck you – it’s bees now!”), Desi on the deer population in Staten Island, and Roy on Franklin from Peanuts (“a straight-up G.”)

Thursday, October 25 – Highlights reel of various Trump-camp folks tonight, collected under the banner “Filling the Swamp.”  First up was a double-whammy of outrageous misuse of taxpayer money, with both Scott Pruitt and Ben Carson spending insane levels of EPA/HUD funds on stupid things like a bulletproof desk (Pruitt), all the while with Carson reiterating his goal of “cutting spending” in his department.  Next up was Dr. Ronny Jackson (remember him?) writing scripts for himself and getting wasted at White House functions.  The show had to do a quasi-montage on Brett Kavanaugh, since there were of course too many recent stories about him to pick just one (the clips of him being questioned after his testimony are still so gross,) and we finished things off with Trevor and Michael coming up with increasingly-pointed insults about Stephen Miller.

No comments:

Post a Comment