Things Kelsey Grammer Says

Just saw that Kelsey Grammer is going to be the face of RightNetwork, a cable channel catering exclusively to conservatives because apparently Fox News doesn't exist or something. Here's Kelsey now, disparaging "partisan politics," among other things, while openly shilling for right wing TV.

I guess the idea behind RightNetwork is to provide non-news/political pundit content for the conservative audience, and one of their pilots is Right2Laugh, a showcase of right-wing comedians. Here's the teaser for it. Uh, yeah.

Let me say, for the record, that I am open to the idea of conservative comedians. Nick DiPaolo was really funny before he went completely off the deep end, and Jeff Foxworthy manages to be funny, be a Republican, and work clean, which requires almost occult levels of wit and timing. Denis Leary has conservative tendencies, as relevant as political alignment is to that Boston Irish mindset of being insanely angry all the time.

However, the problem with a lot of conservative comics is that their routines are too much about proving their own conservatism and less about telling jokes or being funny or exploring the absurd, or really connecting with the audience in any meaningful way. In the teaser I linked, there's maybe one or two jokes that might work beyond an echo chamber in lockstep agreement with the comedian (and only one joke, the one about the Obama coin, that got more than a tepid response from the crowd). Otherwise, the content and delivery don't cover any ground beyond the sort of "X walks like this, but Y walks like this" bullshit pandering that is a staple of ineffective comedy.

That said, Kelsey Grammer has been funny before. And if one of his sex tapes ever goes public, we'll all definitely have something to laugh at.

Football: Gayer than Pro Wrestling

Pro wrestling and football are two of the most hypocritical spectacles of the modern age. They appeal to a largely male audience in a traditionally male way, through encouragement of physical superiority and violence and so on. In short, what they're going for is an image of dominant, unquestionable masculinity, and they consistently fail. Because what they both are, when all's said and done, is gay. Very, very gay. Now, we're going to need an operational definition of the word “gay.” For the purposes of this essay, gay has less to do with hot man-on-man action than it does with heavy handed irony.

Consider two muscular men in bicycle shorts dancing together in the NYC Pride Parade. Now consider that they're standing on the bow of a giant pink float called the Mississippi Queen while the DJ—wearing angel wings and a diaper—plays a medley of remixed Cher hits. Are these two men gay?

No, they are not. Not even if they sing along with the disco whistle. Those two men are openly embracing not just each other, but their homosexuality. They might be doing so in a crude and obvious way, but there is no subtext to it. But when football and wrestling try so hard to avoid and denigrate homosexual imagery that they come full circle and mimic it, that's gay. And what we're proving today is that football is unquestionably gayer than wrestling in this regard. We'll start with the obvious.

The tight end: In an all-male sport, calling anything a tight end is pretty much an invitation for sodomy. Wrestling does not have a tight end. It has wrestlers, it has managers, it has valets, it has bodyguards, and it's even had a genie who impregnated a woman by spitting green mist into her crotch. But it has never had anyone whose position, whether behind or in front of the curtain, was referred to as the tight end. Even the old-school practice of insiders referring to pretty boy tag teams as “blowjobs” implied that they'd be receiving them from the women in attendance. Compare this to what tight ends receive.

The center: At first glance, the center isn't really all that gay. He's the guy in the “center” of the offensive line who snaps the ball to the quarterback. Nothing fishy about that at all, right? ...well, except for the fact that he has to bend over directly in front of the quarterback. That's his job. Wearing tight pants and bending over in front of another man. That's his day. Wrestling doesn't have this. True, it isn't really a team sport, but even tag team wrestling doesn't have a guy who just bends over while his partner does all the work. Yes, that wording was intentional.

Subtlety: This category reaches back around to our operational definition. What's gayer; a guy who says something like “hi, I'm Julian and I love feeling penises in my butt,” or the married high school shop teacher getting dragged out of Club Manhole by the police? The answer involves Julian walking off stage with the silver medal. Wrestling is kind of like Julian. There's just no escaping the fact that WWE owner Vince McMahon has forced grown men to kiss his bare ass on national television. You can't ungay that. You can't even unsee it.

Football, by contrast, tries much harder to hide from the truth. They've managed to obscure their gayness behind mountains of cheerleaders and halftime shows and commercials and cutbacks to the broadcast table every ten fucking seconds. You would think that there was some monetary benefit to all this, measured by ratings and ad revenue. And you'd be wrong – the idea is to never show, under any circumstances, footage of the game itself. All those tight uniforms and bulges and motivational butt pats make for bad television. Or more accurately, like Mr. Shop Teacher and his gym bag full of assless leather pants, football hates itself for things utterly beyond its control.

John Madden: Now that he's retired, it's easy to pick on him, but Madden left behind a legacy of broadcasting that called almost entirely upon upon homosexual imagery. “He hits the hole right after Jesse opens it up” is one of many examples. And when you describe anything in football as “the last shot out of the Roman Candle,” you mean ejaculation. Same for any situation that prompts a comment like “he's going to fire into this guy right here.” Don't argue. You will lose.

Wrestling has had some pretty bad play-by-play men and color commentators over the years, especially the 80s, but nothing can match Madden's consistency. Not even Lord Alfred Hayes' fretting about manager Jimmy Hart “always on his back” and constantly “inventing new things to do to [him],” or Mean Gene Okerlund's questionable on-screen relationship with Hulk Hogan, can compare. They weren't regular announcers anyway – Jesse Ventura and Gorilla Monsoon were the commentators of the Reagan years, and unlike Madden, they could think faster than they spoke. Even Dusty Rhodes was quicker on the draw, and he used words like “clubberin'” on a regular basis. And as dumb and inarticulate as that is, it isn't gay. But the Roman Candle thing? Gay.

So there you have it. Ironclad, irrefutable proof that what happens on the gridiron is roughly ten or eleven times gayer than what happens in the squared circle. Actually, “squared circle” could be a euphemism for the anus...nope, football's still gayer. Tight end. Jesus.

Don't invite me to your wedding

Long ago, I was asked to write a short monologue/speech thing for my friend's bachelor party. I'm sure he regrets it now, because the following is what I wrote, which someone else read in my absence. The names of the groom-to-be, his guests, and his fiancee have been replaced, to protect their dignity and social standing, by names chosen at random from the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame.

Before I begin, I should soothe the anxieties of the environmentally conscious by noting that this speech was written on 30% recycled paper and consists of 60% recycled jokes. Never let it be said that I didn't chip in for the good of us all.

Now then, the speech. When Felix Ross first suggested that I contribute to the roast of our good friend Alex Bennett, I was rather surprised. And flattered. Felix and I, you see, have a unique friendship in which we both hate each other. I was concerned that, due to my as-yet-unstable housing situation, I wouldn't be able to write anything to mark the occasion. But I snapped out of that pretty quickly. This was important, by thunder, and I needed to pull my weight, for two reasons:

1) My friend Alex Bennett, who proposed to his fiancee Alice Fergusson during the opening night performance of Faustus—a play I was in—is embarking on a special and wondrous life journey with someone he obviously loves very much.
2) My friend Felix Ross—who is fruitier than Carmen Miranda's party hat—is attending a heterosexual marriage ceremony. It's a novelty too bizarre and unlikely to let pass without comment.

Oh, and the rest of you oughtn't worry; Felix and Alex are the only two standing in front of my slings and arrows this time. Everyone else gets off easy. Or so your girlfriends tell me.

Anyway, back to the groom-to-be. We met in college, you see, and thus mutual acquaintances often ask me what my first memories are of Alex, and...actually, they don't. My friends know me well enough to never ask me anything like that, because I have the worst short term memory in Christendom. Also, my sleep schedule in college was highly irregular, so I'd often distinctly recall things that never, to be technical, happened. Hell, my first memory of Alex involves us on the sawdust floor of some sketchy oyster cellar, pounding opium into the soles of our feet with wooden mallets as the two lithe, pulchritudinous daughters of a wealthy Arab sheik—himself half-crazed by strong drink and giggling somewhere off in the corner—danced around us before doing things to, with, and for us that we'd only read about in Hustler's Letters to the Editor. And what the hell kind of remembrance is that for a stag party? What kind of effect would it have on Alex as he crawled into bed with Alice? Christ, he'd get cold feet so hard his ankles would freeze together.

Besides, it isn't true. No Arabs attended our alma mater. My first plausible memory of Alex brings to mind an odd, lanky fellow fascinated by Gumby and prone to running about in the woods swaddled in foam. He also played a hand in that year's Dungeons & Dragons campaign as a plucky, young adventurer on an endless search for “tray-sure,” a term I recognize but can't identify.

Other things come to mind as well. His sleep schedule was similar to mine, in that he'd spend all day playing video games in the house I lived in, and he'd be there button-mashing away as I went off to bed for the evening. When I woke up, he'd either still be there playing, indicating that he hadn't slept, or he'd be asleep on the couch, game still on, controller loosely gripped in his slumbering hand. Had I the presence of mind to fetch a camera, the resulting picture would be a modern-day Goatse; familiar to all corners of the Internet and, in its own degraded way, an accurate symbol of the human condition.

...Jesus, why do I write things like this? I must be getting sick. That ungodly cleaning lady of mine is trying to poison me. Revenge for leaving that spanikopita box where their dog could get it, I suspect. But that doesn't have much to do with Alex. I'd better get back on track.

Alex also had, and still has, a remarkable grasp of philosophy. And it is his alone, because when he goes off on random theoretical tears, no one around him knows what the blue fuck he's talking about. Oh sure, the graphs and puppets help. But Tube Socrates can only explain so much before the brain of whoever he's talking to goes into autopilot to avoid implosion.

What else? There's got to be more. I've known the man for years now. Man. How long it's been since his freshman year. Since my freshman year. We're getting old, Alex. It's only a matter of time before we're reminiscing about dining hall food during alumni weekend because it'll be the only thing there that still connects us to the alma mater. Once it hits that point, we're led away from the watering hole at sundown by well-meaning undergraduates who promptly remove us from the breeding pool. Come on, they'll say. Come on, grandpa. Cooing at us like we're goddamned children. Come on and take your medicine.

Good lord, how did that tangent hijack this speech? Did I get a contact high from something? Ether under the carpet? Fresh paint? It doesn't matter. Gotta keep moving.

Alex's theatrical roles come to mind now, for some reason. He played such memorable, imagination-capturing characters as...um...fuck...oh! One of the murdered husbands from Big Love, and the creepy vagrant from The Cherry Orchard, and various Shakespearean parts where he was either good with a sword or gussied up like a Cambodian hooker; I honestly can't remember which, and it may have been both simultaneously.

But it was Faustus, his senior showcase, that I actually do remember, because the stupid bastard cast me in it. And dressed me as a pimp, no less. Working on that show was a lot of fun, and it was my first main stage production (and my only proper one, since I'm trying to expel that ghastly Brecht play from my head with all appropriate speed). Alex put together a professional-looking show with limited time and extremely limited budget, and no jokes are necessary to once again thank him for the experience. The Faustus movie was also pretty cool, although it did suffer a bit towards the end when one of the actors stopped showing up.

And that's pretty much it. Whatever further accomplishments, trials, failures, or successes Alex has experienced during his life are best left for someone else to detail. All I can say is best of luck my friend, may you and Alice have many years of happiness and joy, and please, if you have a kid, don't name it after me. It'll probably turn out to be a serial killer, and I don't want that on my conscience.

Thank you.