This is what happens when you hire the most tepid and out-of-touch comedian you can dig up to perform a routine the year after Stephen Colbert joked truth to power:
Rich Little, with shockingly dyed hair, said at the outset that he is “not political” but rather a “nightclub performer who does a lot of dumb, stupid jokes,” then proved that.He started with a couple of Canada (his native country) jokes and a weak Sen. John McCain, which bombed, as did an impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger, causing him to look at the crowd askance. “You thought Colbert was bad,” he finally joked.
… Little followed by doing six presidents, including a man he “loved,” Ronald Reagan. He put in false teeth to play Jimmy Carter saying that when he was a peanut farmer “I had the biggest nuts in the county.”
As the presidents got more recent, the impressions got weaker: George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and then possibly the worst impression of all, the current president. But he closed with the one he is most famous for, Richard Nixon, saying, “Let’s bring him out of the mothballs one more time.”
… Some in the crowd walked out in the middle of the routine– far more than left during Colbert’s performance last year.
Little in emblematic of the comedic anomie that has crept into Washington. Better safe than funny, right George?
