or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
January 02, 2005
The Frog & Peach & Killing Innocent People
James Wolcott reads The Economist, so we don't have to (via Atrios):
There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hands, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sargeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: 'Back this bitch up, motherfucker!'The old man should have read the bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: 'Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied.' In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching with 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: 'If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,' says a bullish lieutenant. 'It's kind of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent people.'
Wolcott adds:
There's a Peter Cook-Dudley Moore routine, one of their woolgathering dialogues, where Dud asks Pete, "So would you say you've learned from your mistakes?" and Pete replies: "Oh yes, I'm certain I could repeat them exactly."That seems to have been the Bush administration's approach to Iraq. Take the mistakes of Vietnam and repeat them exactly.
The Peter Cook-Dudley Moore routine Wolcott is talking about is "The Frog & Peach" from their show Good Evening. It's an interview with Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, proprietor of a disastrous restaurant by that name. It serves only two dishes: frog a la peche, and even worse, peche a la frog.
You can read a transcript here. But you really need to hear Peter Cook, comedy genius, to get the full effect. And really, why bother when you have the even greater comedy genius of the US government right there on TV.
Dudley Moore: Well, it all sounds rather disastrous to me.Posted at January 2, 2005 09:27 AM | TrackBackPeter Cook: Catastrophic, I think, would be a better word for it.
