Christopher Hitchens Wants You to Know That He's Far Too Smart to Find Jon Stewart Funny

Also, he's  too intellective to find Stephen Colbert riotous and too cerebral to find Al Franken jocuse.

But I'm apparently too dumb to claw my way through the byzantine* logic behind his conclusions…

If you chance to like this sort of thing, then this is undoubtedly the sort of thing you will like. It certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are — and who can doubt it? — cool enough to "get" the joke.

What you will not find, in any of this output, is anything remotely "satirical" about the pulpit of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or any straight-faced, eyebrow-raising (and studio-audience-thigh-slap-triggering) mention of, say, The New York Times's routine practice of captioning Al Sharpton as "the civil rights activist." Baudelaire wrote that the devil's greatest achievement was to have persuaded so many people that he doesn’t exist: liberal platitudinousness must be a bit like that to those who suffer from it without quite acknowledging that there is such a syndrome to begin with.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Just, I'd be a little more convinced if any of that made sense. Or if it was at all clear that he had ever watched more than two episodes of The Daily Show with which to reference. Or took into account that creating "satire" does not preclude one from having a world view or political bent.

In general, I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens. But I prefer the Hitchens who knows from whence he speaks to the Hitchens that just decides to vamp on an unpopular theme for a dozen or so paragraphs to keep his reputation as a contrarian before calling it a day and hitting the liquor cabinet. (Remember his "Look at me!" treatise against vagina-bearing comedians?)

Now, I don't wanna give the impression that there's no room for criticizing Stewart, Colbert or Franken. (Actually, I have a lot of problems with Franken and his party-line Democrat attitude.) But this article, to me, comes off as shallow, uninformed and silly.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go throw poop** at a poster of Dick Cheney.

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^{* I have no idea what that word means. I just mashed my palm onto the keyboard and that came out.}

** Don't worry. It's not my poop.