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I had high hopes when I learned that Taylor Swift and T-Pain were performing together on last night's CMT Music Awards. Two of the most world's most appealing pop stars, mashing up hip-hop, country, and teenpop? A lil' bit of pedal steel, a lil' bit of Auto-Tune? I canceled dinner plans. I switched off the Mets game. And I put myself way out on a limb: I tweeted my excitement.
Bad move. Instead of a live performance, the CMT broadcast opened with a video, "Thug Story," in which T-Pain crooned auto-tune-swathed backing vocals while "T-Swift" flashed a diamond grill and rapped about knitting sweaters. It was, in other words, the latest—the millionth?—example of the White Folks Can't Rap novelty tune, that ubiquitous sketch comedy routine that hammers home a single punch line again and again: Check out this honky rapping—isn't that a riot?
Well, maybe it was in 1983. That was the year of "Rappin' Rodney," in which Rodney Dangerfield reeled off a series of borscht-encrusted one-liners over a thumping beat. Shortly thereafter, Doonsbury creator Garry Trudeau masterminded "Rap Master Ronnie," a mildly—very mildly—amusing spoof of President Reagan.
In other words, this joke is almost as old, and precisely as funny, as "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Yet it continues to get told and told again. Weird Al Yankovic has been working the white and nerdy hip-hop angle for at least a decade. Every time Saturday Night Live's writers are stuck, they disgorge a bit like "Palin Rap." ("My name is Sarah Palin/ You all know me/ Vice-prezzy nominee/ Of the GOP.") On YouTube, you can watch endless variations on the theme: white dudes rapping about Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, about their mopeds, about their inability to "keep a damn beat," about ultimate Frisbee, about organic produce, about Vermont. And the geeky white rapper gag isn't just sketch-comedy fodder; it's a career choice. MC Frontalot and MC Hawking (as in Stephen) are leading lights of nerdcore, a subgenre predicated on the inherent hilariousness of rap songs about Boba Fett.
If YouTube viewing statistics and viral blogging action are any measure, this one-note gag continues to elicit uproarious laughter, across the demographic spectrum. Has a hack comedy routine ever had such cachet? When nuclear physicists, Kanye West, and Karl Rove all agree on a joke, can we safely conclude the joke has lost some of its subversive oomph?
The truth is, "Thug Story" isn't just stale, it's outdated. There are plenty of white MCs these days, and very few are like Vanilla Ice, buffoons obsessed with gangsta authenticity. In fact, one of the best white rappers is a comedian. Andy Samberg has become a 21st-century Tom Lehrer by using hip-hop, his generation's musical lingua franca, as a launching pad for daffy comedy. Samberg's rap parodies flip the nerdcore punchline: They're affectionate genre spoofs, based on Samberg's rapping prowess, his ability to impersonate various hip-hop styles precisely. Listen to "Like a Boss," a spot-on sendup of Slim Thug's bombastic Houston hip-hop, and you'll hear a novel joke: a good white rapper sending up a good black one.
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Tony Sunday is a special day for theater queens, people whose dramatic interests center on venues with more than 500 seats located between Times Square and 65th Street, and thrill seekers who set their TiVo to record anything with the words awards and ceremony in the title. Unless you're an All That Chat natterer or take your evening cocktail in one of the fast-disappearing theater bars off Broadway, the Tonys are a three-hour wonder—the one place on the TV schedule where song and dance rules and Angela Lansbury and Liza Minelli are bigger than Brad and Angelina.
This year, though, the excitement started before the curtain went up on the day's matinees, as several fast-thumbed folks live-tweeted the morning's Tony rehearsal. Ugly Betty's Mark Indelicato: "So everyone. I can say that the opening number is EPIC. It shall be remembered forever by all those who love broadway." StageDoorOnline: "Angela Lansbury got an applause at the #Tony rehearsal for just crossing the stage during a comm. break. (It WAS a great cross though.)" And nominee Jane Fonda: "Liza gave me pointers on how to walk and not hurt. Pull up, tuck butt under, swing shoulders sexily, stand with legs apart to balance, etc."
Indelicato was right; the 10-minute opening number was epic. It started with the dude who sang at Princess Diana's funeral and eventually grew to include everyone in the 10020 ZIP code: the Jets; the Sharks; Dolly Parton; at least two West Wing cast members; a green ogre, a donkey, and a princess; the cast of Hair letting the sun shine in; and the members of Poison throwing around their hair. If only Liza had given Bret Michaels pointers on how to avoid the moving scenery, which knocked him flat on his back when he was slow off his mark.
The evening offered few surprises—the biggest being that the creators of Next to Normal, the story of a bipolar housewife, beat out Sir Elton John and Lee Hall of the heavily favored Billy Elliot, The Musical in the race for best score. Otherwise, Billy Elliot tapped and twirled its way to domination of the musical categories, and God of Carnage wreaked havoc over the awards for plays.
My big question was whether the Tony telecast could win back the title of gayest awards ceremony. After all, in the last couple of years the Oscars have featured more same-sex shout-outs and kisses than their Broadway counterparts. There were some missteps along the way; as when the TV cameras confused Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, both nominated for leading actress in a play for their roles as Mary and Elizabeth in Mary Stuart. As Twitterer Kimberly_Kaye put it, "If Broadway can't keep track of queens, who can?"
True enough, Oscar Eustis of the Public Theater pointed to his (mixed-sex) wedding ring as he called for "equality now" while accepting Hair's award for best revival of a musical, but I didn't catch any winners thanking gay partners, and there was no equivalent of Dustin Lance Black's tear-jerking Oscar acceptance speech for Milk.
Still, it's impossible to out-gay the Tonys. An out emcee in Neil Patrick Harris; a win for Liza Minelli; a lifetime achievement award for Jerry Herman ... As Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman wrote in Harris' divine 11 o'clock number (let's see you replicate that at the Oscars, Hugh Jackman): "This show could not be gayer/ if Liza was named mayor/ and Elton John took flight."
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It is now being widely reported that Sasha Baron Cohen's aerial assault on Eminem at Sunday's MTV Movie Awards was staged. This seemed obvious from the outset—no matter how well Eminem's post-addiction 12-stepping is going, it beggars belief that he could react to a prank of this nature with such Zen-like restraint. God knows, men have been pummeled by rappers' bodyguards for lesser offenses than a nationally televised tea-bagging.
And so we are left to contemplate an icky publicity stunt, designed to drum up business for Eminem's new album, Baron Cohen's forthcoming Bruno movie, and MTV itself. As the cable network, with palpable desperation, sought to replicate its past awards show succès de scandales—Howard Stern's Fartman flight from the rafters; Eminem's showdown with Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog—viewers were treated to the spectacle of two talented and presumably self-respecting artists publicly humiliating themselves in a witless shock-comedy sweat-act, complete with schwanz jokes that would have bombed at Grossinger's 60 years ago.
That Eminem and Baron-Cohen, who have both demonstrated comedic genius in the past, didn't recognize the banality of this gag (as Paris Hilton evidently did) speaks to the lengths to which celebrities will go in pursuit of viral-video success, which, these days, is the best promotion, the real fame. Forget the rapper and the comedian and all of the glittering A-listers on hand—the elephants in the room Sunday night were the dancing baby, the "Charlie bit me!" kid, and the Chocolate Rain dude. Of course, the way things are going, at next year's awards there will be actual elephants in the room, moving their bowels on Andy Samberg's head. LOL!
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