Politically Incompetent

Let's stipulate right at the outset that there's no people like show people, but I don't think it's a news flash to point out, in addition, that show people are pretty dumb. They can be magnificent at dancing, singing, telling jokes, or emoting; wildly creative at lighting a tableau or making the camera jitter the way it does on ER; ingenious in the mystical arts of marketing and dispersing royalties. But when it comes to the higher human faculty that adults outside Hollywood call ratiocination, the ability to have sequential thoughts that flow logically one from another, show people are like no people I know.

Here, for example, is the actor/writer/singer/boytoy Dweezil Zappa, son of the late and more conventionally named Frank, chewing over the case of a Vietnam-era deserter who escaped to Canada and recently requested amnesty:

"I mean, it's so long ago, this war, because to me, like I was born in 1969, and so this whole thing to me, obviously, I was not around to feel the, you know, emotional fervor of what everyone was, like, experiencing on both sides of this war, so to me, at this point, I don't see that any major punishment is necessary."

Here, for another example, is the actress Sally Kellerman on the tribulations of Marv Albert:

"Oh, man, I never wanted to be somebody who sits around and is laughing, because it is so sad. I don't think anybody should force anybody to do anything. I mean, but it's like our world is becoming so exposed that we are seeing that everyone is, like, as weird as you -- or I mean myself."

And here -- and then I'll stop, I promise -- here is the producer and director Garry Marshall, the creator of Happy Days, on the Family and Medical Leave Act:

"It's the times, it's the nineties, it's the time when you have kids you get benefits . . . . From the caveman days, they kind of take care of people, the children and the women they took special care of, through the Greeks, the Romans, through who knows, whatever, through revolutions. So why now, suddenly, why are we going to do some special thing now and say we're all equal?"

Had enough? Then clearly you are not one of the millions of viewers who enjoy Politically Incorrect, the political talk show from which all of the above quotes are taken. PI follows Nightline on ABC. No less an authority than TV Guide has called it "the best talk show on television" - - think of it: better than Sally Jesse, better than Charles Grodin -- and its unexpectedly strong ratings suggest that much of late-night America agrees. The show's host is a former second-tier comic called Bill Maher. Five nights a week he and his bookers bring to a Los Angeles studio a quartet of guests: not merely twinkles from the world of show biz, but also Washington pundits and policy wonks, professional pols, the authors of self-help books and other potboilers, foam-flecked radio-talk-show hosts, and such unclassifiables as Kato Kaelin and Arianna Huffington. Inevitably, television critics have ranged from calling the show "The McLaughlin Group after a few beers" to "The McLaughlin Group on acid." (TV critics tend not to have a wide range.) With the exception of Nightline, PI is unquestionably the most popular chat show about politics now on the air, with almost as many viewers than This Week and Meet the Press combined. This is not good news for politics.

Commercial television is only a half-century old, but in the dog years of pop culture, five decades constitute a millennium, and thus many people have come to mythologize a dimly receding golden age of TV. Maher claims this honored lineage for PI. He has said the show is a throwback to pre-Leno talk shows, when Johnny Carson and Jack Paar would mix the gags with serious palaver among an eclectic panel of guests. And indeed Maher opens the show with a monologue straight out of the Carson playbook; he even has Carson's mannerisms, though he seems fonder of masturbation jokes than Carson was. After the monologue Maher seats his guests in leather arm chairs on a set ringed with Ionic columns and pelts them with subjects for discussion. Some are large and serious (welfare reform), some are jokey ("Should politicians steal a little?"), others are lifted from the morning headlines. All are meant to provoke Dweezil Zappa, or Tom Arnold, or Bob Dornan, or another of Maher's frequent guests to thoughtful and amusing comment. "There's a lot more meat on our bone," Maher told Entertainment Weekly, "stuff for people to think about."