I take no joy in saying things that have already been said.  I like to add to the world’s conversation.  So I’m always faintly embarrassed to profess my love for popular entertainments that have essentially already won the world over. I will more often than not go out of my way to avoid admitting to anyone that I watched The Wire from start to finish and loved every minute of it. It’s like supporting Manchester United, or being a Pixies fan; you’re already winning! Don’t pretend otherwise!

With that out of the way: The Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling. Amazing. Thanks heaps, JSIII. This show has already changed the way I write comedy. Well, I say “write”; more like I did some new material at the Alley Cat last Thursday, listened to half a Best Show here and there on Friday, and then did some of the new stuff again for a bunch of Jane Franklin Hall kids on the Friday night, only with conscious, second-rate Scharpling intonation throughout. Finding a sentence and bitterly returning to it. “What are you doing. Calling on the Pope to resign.” Were the kids impressed? It was hard to tell. They were impatient to get back to their rollerblading, and their sexting, and something called an “engi/pharm cocktail party”. No thanks to that, I said; I’d much rather have a quiet night in with my wife. (We’re not married married at present, but I’ll never turn down an opportunity to lord my maturity over the young and the fancy-free. My life is all fancy.)

And then — if you’ll just ignore that diversion into taunting the local youth — and then, there’s something called Rock, Rot & Rule. Put simply: Tom Scharpling is Tom Scharpling, hosting his radio programme, and Jon Wurster is his guest, Ronald Thomas Clontle, author of the soon-to-be-published book that gives the piece its title; that is, if a book of roughly a hundred pages of simply listing bands by whether they “rock”, “rot” or “rule” can be said to have an author. For the next three-quarters of an hour, they discuss the book and take calls from listeners. It’s devastatingly good. Every step of the process is inspired: the initial germ of the idea, the prepared details of Clontle and his book, the improvised developments as the unsuspecting calls come in, and best of all, the subtle shift in intent, more on which in just a sec…

I mean, I’d recommend listening to this thing in general, y’know, just to people… but I swear, if you happen to be even mildly fascinated by the effect that music criticism can have on people, Rock, Rot & Rule will set your mind racing like nothing else. See, to begin with, it’s fun enough just to piece together the demented logic that drives Clontle’s already-skewif rating system, as Scharpling throws band names at him and manages to elicit the occasional solid clue: the Beatles rock, but don’t rule, because despite all their great songs, they also had a few too many bad songs; David Bowie rots because, unlike the rule-worthy AC/DC, he’s “made too many changes”; it is impossible for a band to rock, and very unlikely for them to rule, if they don’t have any guitars.

But then, oh, then, we have the callers. These aren’t the sort of people where it’s a delight to hear them tricked, as such; they’re just New Jersey music fans listening to their favourite community radio station and trying to engage with the day’s special guest. It’s the power dynamic between Clontle and each individual caller that makes the segment so thrilling. They mock his methods, they question his supposed authority (and it’s here that the background details of Clontle’s character show their full force; it only takes a couple of callers taking shots at his Kansas heritage to reveal how much thought has gone into putting this guy together), and yet they try so hard to win at his game! They try to make him eat his words and win his respect!

Clontle refuses to back down from any opinion, but does so with no strength or conviction, just infuriating shrugs. He is a man who, when faced with an assertion that Stereolab in fact do have guitars, and their early albums were very much built around the guitar sound actually, calmly replies, “History will vindicate me.” And yet still they come, one by one, a succession of callers hoping to be the one to make this guy, who they have never heard of before, break down and admit that Madness didn’t “invent ska”, culminating in someone literally holding a ’60s ska record up to the phone in a mad, desperate attempt to make him see reason. Listen and you will hear yourself somewhere in there; I know I did.

So what is it about hard-to-impress people that makes us fight just a little bit too hard to impress them? There’s a top dog in our little music scene who I began to think of as soon as Clontle’s challengers started pouring in; he doesn’t have Clontle’s ignorance, but shares his status as an immovable object that mortals keep hurling themselves at. He’s deeply critical of all music, local or international. The question is often posed to him, “Well, for heaven’s sake, what do you like?”; it’s laced with sarcasm and exasperation, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s also a genuine query. Local bands who earn his ire claim that it means nothing to them because he hates everything anyway, then ask him if he’d like them better if the guitars were a bit scuzzier.

Now, here’s the intended endpoint, which has taken me a lot longer to reach than I was expecting: very, very nice timing for me to hear Rock, Rot & Rule for the first time so soon after Roger Ebert repeats his claim that video games cannot be considered art. I’m guessing he’s repeated it, as all my favourite video game news and commentary sites have been packed to bursting with essays in response; the whole discussion fills me with so much inertia that I can’t even muster the energy to dredge up a single explanatory URL. What we have is a man of some stature in the world of cinema, stating that video games, as an entire medium, do not fit his own personal definition of “art”, which is one hell of a hazy category for things in this world at the best of times. And hot damn it’s embarrassing, the number of words that have been generated in response. “B-but what about Ico? What about BioShock? For the love of God, have you even played Final Fantasy VII?!”

I love video games, always have done. I say they’re an art form. And not just the artsy ones, neither; Paul Constant said it best when commenting on this incredible Wired article about the Duke Nukem Forever saga: “Anyone who denies that video games are an art form should read this story; the game designers suffer from that certain kind of hubris that only art can inspire in a person.” But I’m siding with Ebert on this one, as the lesser of two cringes. History will vindicate him!

I published this elsewhere in October 2008, my one and only foray into TV reviewing. The series in question never did return, sadly; one presumes, for its star, life just got in the way. My opening point about how vital it is for comedy to be built upon at least some small foundation of truth still stands, however, and I’ve yet to see anyone unwittingly illustrate it better than John McCain at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner. (For the curious, both McCain and Obama’s routines are neatly laid out in order here; oh, that old time, those old days!)

So we’ve seen Barack Obama and John McCain gently poke fun at themselves and each other at the Al Smith dinner, and Sarah Palin get within breathing distance of the joke that has been made of her persona, campaign and entire life on Saturday Night Live and embrace it about as awkwardly as one can. For what it’s worth, I haven’t dared watch the Palin appearance, but McCain had the delivery and timing to do his material justice, I thought. Where he finally lost me was with the ACORN material, mind; I couldn’t tell you whether it’s a widely-accepted rule in comedy or just a pet peeve of mine, but his ACORN bit, to me, was the direct equivalent of any other stand-up comedian with two or three minutes’ worth of material that begins with an urban legend presented unironically as fact, and hinges entirely on that wilful ignorance. In the minutes preceding, there were elements of comic exaggeration, absurdity — yeah, I know you haven’t replaced your entire campaign staff with Joe the Plumber, but heck, John, I’ll go there if you’ll take me — but there was never a Seaman Staines or a Master Bates on Pugwash, “Puff the Magic Dragon” was never about smoking pot, and ACORN aren’t out to commit mass voter fraud in Obama’s favour. I don’t believe it, you don’t believe it, and if the joke isn’t the fact that you’re acting like you believe it, then that’s the end of that; you can’t even impress me as a comedian. On the other hand, Obama’s material actually benefited a great deal from not having been written by the man himself; he drew out the lamest punchlines and, as Letterman does in some of his best moments, clearly revelled in the limp ones: “My middle name is actually Steve. Barack… Steve… Obama.”

That’s not the point, though, far from it. Nobody would have accepted that Joe the Plumber material from anyone else, and the same goes for just about anything either of those two big men said that night. They were there to be adored and celebrated for being powerful, influential people with a hell of a lot still at stake, dipping even so much as a big toe into the pool of comedy. By all reports, the bulk of Palin’s SNL appearance was spent sitting and “raising the roof” while someone else (not even Tina Fey) did a rap about her. And yet they’re all being congratulated soundly by their supporters, reluctantly by their opponents, and in clinical, joke-destroying detail by the media, all for a pinch of carefully regulated levity and self-parody.

And in all this, barely a fucking word about Joe Biden.

A word of clarification, for the newcomers: Joe Biden is a Delaware senator and Democratic nominee for the United States vice-presidency. Joe Biden is the witty, uncompromising, criminally underrecognised, at times distressingly dark, Curb-meets-Nixon HBO comedy series with the aforementioned senator as its producer and star. It’s just wrapped up its first 13-episode season, with a second already scheduled for mid-2009. I’ve been getting by on whatever sporadic, patchy torrents I can find, presently the only option for those of us outside the US; there’s talk that SBS has picked it up for broadcast in Australia, but one suspects they’re waiting on the election result before making a final decision one way or the other.

I still vividly remember coming across the trailer on YouTube. It began, white text on black, velvet-voiced announcer: “Who is the real Joe Biden?” What followed seemed at first to be the work of a particularly skilled and inspired video manipulator, someone with the necessary time and resources to redub him whispering demented Anthony Robbins mantras to himself before a campaign speech, and even find someone who looked enough like him in dim light to sit shirtless in the living room with the lights out, eating raisins by the handful and trolling freerepublic.com. But as the quality shifted from “impressive” to “eerily professional”, it dawned on me that this really was Joe Biden arguing with a Burger King manager, wearing a ridiculous wig and moustache while urgently pushing through the crowds at a McCain/Palin rally, sobbing uncontrollably in a jacuzzi next to Peter Bogdanovich.

Amazingly, the series itself did not disappoint in the slightest. Biden doesn’t pull any punches, and what’s more, they’re all aimed back at himself; all his neuroses and petty insecurities are laid bare, with an apparent total lack of consideration for the real-world aftermath. He’s a uniquely talented comic actor, and you only have to watch closely for a second to see that he’s clearly playing a character, but try to find the point where the character ends and the real live man begins, and you’re on your own. Of all the people who have shaken Biden’s hand and exchanged a few words with him during the obligatory diner and factory visits, none have yet reported him making awkward astrological innuendo (as his TV persona did with a nonplussed forty-something waitress in episode 2), but many have picked up on his apparent difficulty maintaining eye contact. Biden himself even caused ripples of disquiet among concerned supporters when he admitted during a recent AV Club interview that while he isn’t yet certain what direction the show will take in its second season, he feels that “a lot of the ideas set up in the first season could only truly reach fruition if we lose this election”.

If you’re wondering what Barack Obama makes of all this, don’t expect any answers any time soon. Many have taken his brief, uncredited appearance in episode 1 as a tacit endorsement of the show (Biden watches from a distance as Obama and Governor Tim Kaine, who had also been on Obama’s vice-presidential shortlist, engage in animated conversation at a campaign fundraiser; he spends the rest of the episode sick with worry, unable to sleep for the thought that Kaine would have been a better selection and that he himself could single-handedly lose the election for Obama). However, he has proved uncharacteristically evasive when questioned about his running mate’s “other life”, and the closest he has ever come to a definitive statement on the subject was claiming that his wife Michelle had dutifully recorded every episode on their TiVo and that he would make his way through them “after this is all over”.

Last week’s season final, perhaps the best episode of the lot, introduced Peter Bogdanovich as “Morty”, Biden’s best friend from high school, now a literature professor at Princeton. The two bond instantly, and Biden soon finds himself desperately jealous of Morty’s free-spirited life of drug-fuelled academia. The episode ends with Biden, during a weekend away at Morty’s California beach house, squeezing through the bathroom window late at night and making a run for the trees, wearing only his pyjamas. What is he running from, and why? Is he evading his own Secret Service agents, or Morty himself? All he has with him is a harmonica he stole from Morty’s mantlepiece. Compelling viewing, and it’s going to take more than Obama making Superman jokes at a televised dinner party to make the wait for season 2 any easier to bear.