Presenting War
Mike was a professional comedian with a late-night TV show. His nation was at war, he was there to entertain. Drones attacking, bombs dropping, many killed (mostly innocent civilians.) Wasn’t it time for a laugh? What was funny about war, Mike asked himself (and his writers)?
Watching buildings blow up may be fun but was not funny. Mike knew all we see of war is stuff being blown up. Looking at corpses and the wounded was far from funny, so you never saw it, neither in the mainstream nor nonmainstream media. Certainly not on Mike’s TV show.
Politicians running wars are often funny. You could joke about them. The President waging war was often hilarious (unintentionally). His armed forces “obliterated” another nation’s nuclear capabilities, then eight months later he launched an air assault because the same nation was one week from building an atom bomb. It would be funnier if there were not dead people rotting under his use of “obliterate.”
Mike could hardly joke about servicepeople risking their lives. And making funnies about the other nation’s dead servicepeople felt beyond the pale. Mike decided there was nothing funny about war and instead offered his audience what the politicians themselves offered to the public: a nightly song about the war, followed by dancing soldiers (the women in heels.)