I defend Tracy Morgan for what he said about Sarah Palin and masturbation.

"It’s unfortunate Mr. Morgan showed a lack of judgment on our air with his inappropriate comments. We apologize for any embarrassment or offense it may have caused," says TNT, apologizing in nonapology form — Sorry if you were offended — for what Tracy Morgan said on "Inside the NBA."

During yesterday’s live broadcast, co-hosts Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley handed 30 Rock‘s Morgan a microphone and asked him to settle a bet: Tina Fey or Sarah Palin? “Me and him have this argument all the time, ” crowed Smith, referring to Barkley. “[Morgan's] the only one who can settle it. Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?”

I'm going to defend Morgan. He did exactly what a great comedian should do. He called bullshit on Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley. They were doing their little show and keeping it light with fully deniable sexual innuendo. The question "Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?" implied sex. What Tracy Morgan did was not to bring sex up out of nowhere. It was seeing the sex that was already being talked about — in TV-friendly maybe-we're-not-really-talking-about-it style — and to surprise with a sudden jab of straight talk as if Kenny and Charles were already openly talking about masturbation. He called bullshit on their innuendo. Now, TNT prissily withdraws. Ha. I'm offended by their prissy withdrawal. They want the benefit of Smith and Barkley's roundabout references but they don't like the comedian undercutting the deniability.

"Why are people so cruel on the internet?" Tina Fey is asked...

... after winning a Golden Globe and telling various commenters at The Envelope to "suck it." Video and commentary here. And here are the commenters at The Envelope talking about Tina talking about them:

anyone who reads the Envelope even on a cursory basis knows that when she started with "Babson LaCrosse" (who has since slunk away and changed his screen name (hahahahahhaaha) and continued with "Dianefan" and "Cougar Lover" that she was talking about The Envelope....

Oh My God! Tina is among us! I screamed at the tv when she said 'dianefan' and 'Babson LaCrosse'... I'll just start to say bad things about her right now on every single thread of this forum...

Now, Jesus said "Love your enemies," and he was onto something. And I don't mean pussy Jesus with the lambs and such. "Love your enemies" can be a muscular strategy if you do it with style, as Tina did. And I think it works especially well on the internet, where everyone is looking for love, really — aren't they? — whether they're gawking at porn sites or trashing divas.

"I had a baby, I did some traveling, I very briefly expanded my wardrobe, I made a few speeches..."

"... I met a few VIPS, including those who really impact society, like Tina Fey."

Sarah Palin describes her recent past, at the Republican Governors meeting, today.

"TV is starting to feel waaay too slooooow."

Michael Parsons writes:

The complex fractal circular time-shifted way in which my media habits now play out – hear about Tina Fey doing a Saturday Night Live impression of Sara Palin on an RSS feed, watch the clip at work on YouTube, then go home to watch the same clip being shown on The Daily Show, and then read online about what happened on the daily show via an RSS feed – means that my experience of the election had a multithreaded, always-on quality I’ve simply never experienced before. ... [M]y home network went on the fritz at 2am on election night, leaving me with only my handheld Twitter and the TV. I felt positively unplugged....

The advantages of web technology here are clearly to do with intimacy, connection, and immediacy. Twitter is a great way to consume huge amounts of information when you’re trying to understand a complex real-time process.... However, I was also struck by a much bigger, tonal difference. The BBC ‘s snooze-making election coverage was shamefully poor, and seemed to consist of a sleeping Dimbleby and a bobbing Vine, along with a few other B-grade pundits who gave the evening all the drama and insight of a minor English by-election. Broadcast TV, with its narrow tone, its low-brow certainties, just felt hopelessly out of date....

Yeah, well, that was England. We had holograms. And Parsons knows that -- perhaps because the flashy high-tech junk on American TV was mocked on the first segment of "The Daily Show" the day after the election. (Watch it here, starting at 2:48.)

You can tell TV has a sort of blurry panicked fear that the web is eating its lunch. Something Must Be Done. This is why TV presenters used daft gizmos – swingometers, touch-screen displays, even in CNN’s case, holograms, to try and stay down with the tech kids. This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight, mistaking an unrelated symptom for a fundamental cause.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says:

"This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight..."

TV: Wait! It's not over until the fat lady sings.

Us: But she can't sing, she's just fat...

It's over.

AND: XWL says the holograms were a lie:

[T]he so-called holograms were simply 2D images superimposed onto the TV broadcast.

The images were in fact tomograms, or images captured from all sides - in this case by 35 high-definition cameras set in a ring inside a special tent - reconstructed by computers and displayed on the screen.

Tomograms!

John McCain on "SNL."

The opening with Tina Fey:



On "Weekend Update" (with some booing):



McCain has excellent comic delivery. "The Sad Grandpa" made me laugh out loud.

Sarah Palin on "Saturday Night Live."

How do you think they'll handle it? I like this prediction, from Zachary Paul Sire, in the comments in The Riverside Tavern post:

Palin will be Palin, and various cast members will be dressed up like her, trying to impersonate her, auditioning so to speak. She'll be judging them in some fashion. None of them will be good. But then Tina Fey will come out and there will be some sort of split screen, face to face moment between the two of then, standing in awe of each other.

Then again, I don't know.

They aren't going to do anything political because a) they don't want to make her look bad, and b) they don't want to make her look good, either. It will be politically neutral and more about the surreal imitation that Fey does it. A sort of cinema verite moment.

But maybe by the time you get here, the show will have already aired, in which case, what did you think of it?

UPDATE: That was mildly amusing. Alec Baldwin got to stand next to Palin and insult her -- by accident, thinking she was Tina -- and then got to say something that's true: Sarah Palin is more attractive than Tina Fey. Did Fey deserve that? No. Palin seemed like a seasoned actor, which is nice... but disturbing. If our politicians are great actors, we have a big problem. [ADDED ON REWATCH: Did Baldwin say Palin is more attractive than Fey? He mistook Palin for Fey, then, corrected, told Palin she was more attractive in person. I think that means he believed Palin was less attractive than Fey, but now, seeing Palin in person, he acknowledges Palin's equivalent attractiveness. Or something. The disrespect to Fey that I thought was there is, technically, not.]

MORNING UPDATE: Palin reappeared in the "Weekend Update" section of the show, which I can see in the comments, many of you watched in real time. I had to turn the show off after a minute of the opening monologue. Really, I was interested in seeing Palin again, but I can't sit through that stuff. TiVo in the morning worked just fine. Palin was a good sport, sit-down dancing and smiling, while Amy Poehler did a hilarious rap routine. Poehler is heavily pregnant, but she doesn't let that slow her down at all, which is rather Palinesque. I laughed out loud when the Todd character came out and at the line "All the plumbers in the house, pull your pants up."

(By chance, I'd just turned on live TV to see Joe the Plumber on "Fox and Friends" and they razzed him in person about the one thing everyone thinks is funny about plumbers. As they put it: "Why don't plumbers wear belts?" Joe went on at some length on the topic -- defensive! The life of a plumber is tough. It's not easy, as some people seem to think.)

ADDED: The opening:



The rap:

You judge the new Tina Fey skit spoofing Sarah Palin.

I clicked it off at 1:29 even though I wanted to blog about it. I thought it was too dumb and boring to watch. Waiting all those long seconds with Amy Poehler nodding while the audience got and whooped about an old joke. Presumably, the writers load up the front end of a sketch with some of the good stuff, but all they had was old crap about out-of-towners coming to New York.

You know, Palin-haters, New York's electoral votes will go to Obama. It's people in other states who will decide this thing. Portraying non-New Yorkers as rubes is not only a weak comedy idea. It's a weak political idea. And tip to you comedy writers who imagine yourselves at all sophisticated: If you have a Bush = pubic hair joke, you don't have a final draft.

But, as I said, I clicked off at 1:29. So form your own opinion.

Emmy winners.

The list.

A lot easier to read the list than to watch the damned show. Did you watch? Do you care about anything on this list? I guess it's mildly interesting that Paul Giamatti won a best actor award "John Adams." I still haven't been able to plow through to the end of that thing, and I have the DVD set (which HBO sent me for free). I found it so alienating, the way everything seemed so small -- as if Abigail ran the farm without any help and President Adams ran the country through various one-on-one arguments with petulant egotists. And now I see that Giamatti won over Ricky Gervais in "Extras." That's just stupid.

Now, this is funny:

INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE IN A VARIETY OR MUSIC PROGRAM

Jon Stewart, “80th Annual Academy Awards” (ABC)
David Letterman, “Late Show With David Letterman” (CBS)
* Don Rickles, “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project” (HBO)
Tina Fey “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Stephen Colbert, “The Colbert Report” (Comedy Central)

Stewart and Colbert will likely be hilarious on the subject of losing to Rickles. And Tina Fey, otherwise the darling of the night -- she won 3 Emmys -- lost to him too. Ha ha.

Sarah Palin's most famous quote and the problem of a quote becoming famous in a misremembered form.

What do you think is Sarah Palin's most famous quote? My attempt to answer gets me to a quote that I know is not the real quote: "I can see Russia from my house." I know that's how Tina Fey spoofed Palin on SNL. The real quote is: "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska."

So, 3 questions:

1. Do you have a better idea for Sarah Palin's most famous quote?

2. What are some other quotes that are remembered in the wrong form? I don't mean quotes attributed to the wrong person but quotes that are more often stated in a particular incorrect form.

3. Can you think of a word -- a sniglet -- to mean a misquote that becomes more of a famous quotation than the original? Something like pseudo-quote, but better.

IN THE COMMENTS:

1. Zeek says "Palin's most famous quote has to be the pit bull/lipstick joke which was riffed on by Obama and also made the SNL sketch." I agree.

2. Jason comes up with the best answer right off the bat: "I invented the Internet," making Al Gore's "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" shorter, funnier, and more damaging.

3. 2 great responses: "Malapropaganda" (from EnigmatiCore) and "substiquote" (from dcbyron).

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.

Did you think she was good? Was she better or worse than the writing? I thought it was okay.