Laugh Track

During Arianna Huffington’s presentation on a panel about political satire at the recent Times Book Festival, she described how she had been reading her 8-year-old daughter’s diary. I quoted Lenny Bruce--”I am part of everything I indict”--then chastised her for poking fun at wiretapping yet invading the privacy of her own child. With the skill of a well-honed talk-show guest, she immediately replied, “I think every parent should snoop on their children.”

The audience laughed and applauded, not necessarily because they agreed with her sentiment but rather in appreciation of the quickness of her response. Although that kind of speed can work in a live situation, it does not translate well to a book, in this case “Greetings From the Lincoln Bedroom,” Huffington’s first-person spoof of scandal and corruption.

The premise is simple: Having lost a bet to Al Franken (her strange bedfellow from “Politically Incorrect’s” coverage of the 1996 presidential conventions), Huffington must make a donation to the Democratic National Committee and, as a result, gets invited to spend a weekend at the Clinton White House.

She takes a faux-innocent, Alice-in-Wonderland approach to revealing her make-believe visit, encountering inhabitants along the way ranging from Al Gore as a statue stored in the basement to Madonna breast-feeding her baby at Hillary’s tea party.

Since Huffington is writing easy-reference shtick about public figures, her characters remain as one-dimensional as those scattered throughout a Jay Leno monologue, except perhaps for Socks, a talking cat who is also gifted with psychic power.

Huffington meets Clinton’s friends, sitcom producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, with the aid of a running gag. Whenever they speak, there is the sound of audience reaction, italicized in parentheses: (Short laugh); (Mild applause); (Polite chuckles); (A knowing moan); (Approving murmur); (Collective groan); (Frustrated grumble); (Confused, nervous laugh). Well, you get the point, right? (Reader nods).

Humor is subjective, of course. Some of Huffington’s one-liners merely made me wince--”Janet Reno offered to show me a few wrestling holds (I declined). Madeleine Albright offered up a smorgasbord of Jewish wisdom, parables, jokes and quotes from the Talmud”--but here’s a piece of material that actually made me grimace out loud:

” . . . the small figure that emerged from the underbrush [near the hot tub that Bill Clinton was soaking in with Newt Gingrich among others] was only Socks, carrying a dead rat. It’s too bad Newt hadn’t brought majority whip Tom DeLay with him. A guy who made his fortune in the extermination business would love this.

“ ‘Socks, are there any of those inside?’ I asked.

“ ‘You mean outstanding public servants like Newt Gingrich? Yeah, there’s plenty.’

“ ‘No, I mean rats,’ I said.

“ ‘So do I,’ Socks shot back.

“ ‘I just have a hard time accepting that two men who seem like opposites can get along so well.’

“ ‘You think they’re getting along well now, you should see them in a little while when the girls arrive.’ ”

In the world according to Huffington, the one thing Clinton and Gingrich have in common--besides their junk-food gluttony and fund-raising ability--is that both believe the Bible says oral sex is not adultery. Now that’s bipartisanship.

Indeed, one of Huffington’s imaginary friends is named Bipartisan. At brunch, when a rank-smelling tureen of mushy stew is served--containing pieces of hot dog, chicken bits, egg yolk, asparagus, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and cornflakes--Bipartisan explains, “It has something for everybody, just like the new budget deal. Tax cuts for families and investors, new entitlements, new spending on education for the middle classes. And a balanced budget! A Bipartisan triumph!”

And here is Bipartisan’s take on Clinton’s peccadilloes: “His alleged behavior, if proven to have occurred, is reprehensible. And yet I deplore the snoops and busybodies of the press who invade private lives, while not forgetting that a free press in turn helps guarantee our freedoms, which include the freedom to snoop and busybody as we please. Now if the president did something wrong, he should be punished. However, we don’t have all the facts, and if we dig too hard we risk a witch hunt. I’m in favor of fidelity in marriage, but the First Amendment says we have the right to lie to anyone, even our spouses, except under oath, but what is truth anyway?”

The problem with Huffington’s “Greetings From the Lincoln Bedroom” is that it’s anti-climactic to the mega-sitcom that continues to unfold in Washington. The challenge to satire isn’t America’s alone. In “The Congress of Clowns and Other Russian Circus Acts,” Joel Schechter writes about Russian satire after glasnost: “In Leningrad, the highly regarded humorist Semyon Altov said that he has moved from satire to non-topical, more universal fiction in his recent writing, because newspaper reporters are now providing the public with the news of dissent that only satire could convey previously.”

Today, we live in a world where everything is increasingly accelerating, including the rate of irreverence. Reality has long been nipping at the heels of satire and has finally overtaken it. This is a problem for comedians everywhere. It is especially acute for Huffington. Monica Lewinsky, for example, didn’t enter the scene until after Huffington had completed her book, and she had to go through the manuscript page by page, sprinkling in as many Lewinsky references as she could muster in pursuit of that fool’s gold--timeliness. For example, Huffington’s fictional liaison to the domestic staff informs her, “The White House facilities are at your disposal twenty-four hours a day. They include, but are not limited to, the tennis court, the swimming pool, the putting green, the Rose Garden, the helipad, the press briefing room, the movie theater, the library, the missile defense system, and our new business center with fax capability. Oh, and there’s also a massage center staffed twenty-four hours a day by White House interns. Ask for Monica, she’s got the best hands. At least that’s what the president says.”

I’m a First Amendment nut, but I felt like putting a gag order on Huffington’s cheap-shot, double-entendre intern gags. Strangely, Huffington turns herself into a victim. In the last paragraph of the acknowledgments, she writes: “And thanks to Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Ken Starr, Vernon Jordan, and all the others whose tireless efforts to provide, promote, or interfere with sex in the White House dragged political satire into the gutter, turning a book that I would have proudly shown to my young daughters into one that I now have to keep locked and hidden.”

But there’s always the possibility that her 8-year-old daughter, following in her mother’s footsteps, will somehow manage to sneak a reading of her book, only to discover that it’s not as much fun as watching the TV news.