We've Got Politics Covered

About that...

Comedy Central usually has a policy against taking new political humor. Yet somehow... God, somehow the worst piece of "political satire" made it not only across their desks but onto the air, and without the scent of a celebrity or sense of humor in site. I'm speaking, of course, of "Lil' Bush."

There are too many points to detail here, like the horrible Bush impersonation that sounds like the actor is just straining to say everything and kind of has his mouth full, or the horrible animation that I could honestly accomplish with much less money than they're likely given to do it. What's important to discuss is how this show ever got on a channel with "Comedy" in the name.

Let's begin with how to accomplish good political satire. Firstly, all of your jokes should have some kind of real-world analog - hence, the point of satire in the first place. And that seems to be where "Lil' Bush" stops being political satire. It has a starting point, but it makes the same jokes over, and over, and over. Take the 8-year-old version of George W. Bush's use of the word "decider" - If they had picked a good point in their story to use it, it might have been a little more than a tired joke. Instead, they say "decider" at least twenty times, not counting the song in which it's featured another twenty or so.

Somehow the writers get away with being more juvenile than their titular character, hitting you over the head constantly, whether Lil' Dick Cheney's dad is Darth Vader or whether Lil' Dick Cheney himself is drinking blood fresh from a chicken, there's not an ounce of subtlety. And as we know, an ounce of subtlety is worth a ton or so of ham-handedness.

If you're going to do political satire, do it right. Don't do another show surrounding Bush, thinking it will somehow succeed ("That's My Bush," a mock-sitcom, by the creators of South Park, was a miserable failure) and then tell young undiscovered talent that you have politics covered. Maybe you do, but the people who write your shows don't.

And looking at their credits on IMDB, other than one of them working on the most recent miserable failure in Comedy Central's history, "The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show," there's not much to write home about. These aren't the tried-and-true satirists of The Daily Show or The Onion (from which TDS likes to recruit). These are comedy writers. Give them another sketch show. Give them some other cartoon. But leave politics and, frankly, any kind of satire, to people with smaller hands. You know what they say about guys with big hands. They hit too many keys at once and write crappy scripts.