Someone Call the Morgue: Funny or Die Has Had a Propaganda Accident

Hollywood Lefties just keep lining up to churn out for the Obama agenda. Heck, you’d think they were on that NEA call in August.  Their latest “accomplishment” is a mock PSA from Will Ferrell and Co. at the all-too-aptly named Funny or Die. Produced in conjunction with MoveOn.org—part of the community-organized machine that continues to mobilize on behalf of the president—the video manages to be distinctly unfunny.

I don’t say that simply because I fundamentally disagree with the message it so blatantly aims to communicate. I’ve been known to laugh at lots of things that, as a conservative, I technically shouldn’t find amusing. Sometimes the execution of a left jab is patently brilliant. And I can take a sharp dig in good fun. I do take issue with the bushel of misinformation the video contains. But mostly, I contend that the video isn’t funny because its manner of execution and expression misses the mark of pretty much any comedic genre for which it may have been aiming.

The reasons for this parodic shortfall are many. Foremost among them?  The video takes itself and its true subject matter—the “need” for a government-run health care “option”—far too seriously. The line between funny and not funny is often perilously thin. One false step and the comedian indeed falls to his figurative death. This tightrope becomes even more precarious when you try to balance a sermon on it. If one attempts this feat, one had best be prepared for the likely consequences. In this case, what resulted was not the tongue-in-cheek skewering of a Saturday Night Live sketch or the sardonic jab of the Daily Show. It’s instead clumsy, droning, hypocritical moralizing. It’s a propagandistic message delivered almost straight up…with sledgehammer subtlety.

Watch it for yourself.

Where oh where did this piece of tripe go wrong?

First, it’s no accident that Funny or Die shot the video in black and white. This visual device has long served as a metaphor for plain truth. The film-noir lighting is further intended to work in conjunction with the melodramatic surface text in order to throw the not-so-hidden subtext into high relief. How original. How bold. If you’ve been living in a yurt for the last several decades, that is.

An array of celebrities—we are definitely getting used to seeing them arrayed like this, no?—emerge from the darkness and step boldly into the light to proclaim, one after the other, “Something terrible is happening.”

Only after we’ve seen a parade of faces repeating the same sentence again and again does Will Ferrell finally explain, “Insurance company executives are getting a bad rap.”

The parade continues, each individual taking segments of the following: “As the health care debate heats up, we need to remember who the real victims are: health insurance executives. People are saying a lot of mean things about health insurance companies, and it’s gotta stop.”

And therein the video’s Alinsky-esque mission is revealed: target, ridicule, isolate. MoveOn.org has enlisted yet another willing bunch of useful idiots to do a Hollywood hit job and stick it to “the Man” with an audiovisual shiv. Except it doesn’t really work to stick it to the Man, when you are the Man by the Left’s own definition. You don’t need to own a corporation anymore. You just need to have enough money to support yourself. And this bunch of green bananas unquestionably has that several times over.

Since you’ve set the preachy tone here, Hollywood, it’s only fair that someone tell you to take the log out of your own eye before you look like an even bigger bunch of posers than you already do.

Here’s an idea: Why don’t you scale back, Hollywood?  Why don’t we start telling you what your going rate per episode or film will be?  Or, I know!  Better still, we could tax you at 100% of everything you make right now…maybe even retroactively…certainly in perpetuity. It’s nothing personal, you understand. It’s just that it turns out you’re some of those despicable, rich bastards you all keep informing us about. If we just started handling your income for you—if you’d just let us make you the virtuous people you obviously really want to be—think how easily we could fund health care for those 47 mill—er [Oops! Forgot that number has been revised]—make that the “30 million” uninsured folks you seem so desperate to help by putting the rest of us in the poor house. I mean, hey, we understand. The eye of that needle seems downright microscopic. But let us assist you in the self-actualization process and jam your oversized camel on through.

Now where was I…

Oh yes. The clumsy, sarcastic blather continues.

Olivia Wilde ponies up with this little kicker: “Insurance companies need our support because they keep our selfish priorities in check when we can’t.” Coming from the self-indulgent, self-reflexive, self-righteous likes of the Celluloid Gang, this line causes so much cognitive dissonance for the viewer as nearly to sink the entire two-minute-plus video only 42 seconds in.

“Pleeease, Doctor, my daughter’s, dying,” Ben Garant mockingly whines. “She needs medication.”

“Think about somebody else for once,” Linda Cardellini harshly snaps back.

“If my kid falls off his bike and breaks his leg, he should have to pay that money out of pocket—out of his allowance,” Donald Faison asserts.

“How else is he going to learn not to fall off that bike,” Olivia Wilde retorts with a slight sneer.

Yeah… Those mean, nasty, capitalist insurance executives.  Horrible ogres who take people’s money and then deny coverage!  Disgusting!  The government would never, ever do that!

Grey matter seems in alarmingly short supply in Hollywood.

Will Ferrell chimes in: “And insurance companies are detailed enough to deny claims for things like typos. If you spell something wrong, do you think you really deserve surgery?”

…As if the federal government is not the single most bureaucratic, draconian, and incompetent entity in the country. I won’t cite the litany of proof. Thinking individuals already know it by heart. Unthinking individuals wouldn’t get it anyway.

Let me speak to you directly for a moment, Will. If the government gets control of your health care, typos are the last thing you’ll need to worry about. If your friends in Congress ram this little “public option” of theirs through as they’re threatening to do—about which I’m sure you’re tickled pink—I wish you luck in finding a doctor—much less getting an appointment with one when something goes seriously wrong with your health.

See, it’s a funny thing, Will—funny strange, not funny haha. Just like actors, doctors like to be compensated for the work they do. In fact, in that ubiquitous little Values Clarification game “progressives” like you love to play, doctors tend to come out ahead of actors on a pretty regular basis. So, logically, I guess that means they actually deserve to earn more than you do. Except most doctors—especially primary care doctors—don’t make even close to what you make. And, even more oddly, at least 45% of them are pretty sure that under the “public option” they’ll be making even less, making it difficult for them to maintain their practice. They’re saying they’d potentially throw in the towel and do something else rather than try to continue in medicine under the onerous system of taxation and regulation that would ultimately result from the “public option.” And gee, Will, that spells lots and lots of rationing to me.

Yes, inconveniently for you, Will, two thirds of doctors think the “public option” is putrid. M.D.s are generally more reputed for intelligence than the actors who play them on t.v. So, really, I have no hesitation in asserting that they have more neurons firing about health care reform than you or any of your little video playmates. Thus, I’m rather more inclined, Will—again, nothing personal—to listen to their reasoned opinion over your pure spin.

Yeah, good luck at the doctor’s office, Will. Maybe you and your Funny or Die buddies could do improvisational comedy for the unnecessarily terminal patients standing in line with you. There’s a hilarious idea…

It wasn’t enough for this video just to be stupid and sarcastic, though. It wouldn’t be a real propaganda piece without a few good old-fashioned lies thrown in. Jon Hamm has the audacity to recite that 80% of the American people want the public option because “it would give quality care people could actually afford.”

Really, Jon…?  Eighty percent…? Any chance you’d care to retract that statistic now before you end up choking on it?

And “afford”?  Jon, You leave me no choice but to refer you to Liberal Progressive Programming – Session A, Part 2.

Let me explain to you veeeeeerrrrrrrry sloooooooowly so that your analytically-impaired brain can keep up. Here’s how the “public option” will go, Jon. At the beginning, the government will subsidize more and more and more health care costs, dragging its private competitors into a cost cutting spiral to keep customers. It will do this until the private competitors can no longer sustain themselves. Will that bring down the surface cost of health care… SURE!  You betcha, Jon!  But you know how the government is going to pay for all of that subsidization, Jon?  Repeat after me: “Taxation.” Not just a little taxation, Jon. A LOT of taxation. So much that you might be able to afford your health care, but you won’t be able to afford anything else you need or want. Cool, huh…?  Great plan. Keep holding onto that dream.

Next, this cast of windbags lists off what they intone as the criminally greedy purchases of health insurance executives…five mansions, corporate plane, $500 million in chump change, a mini-zoo in the backyard. Let me get this straight… All of you upright do-gooders live modest lives. You’ve given everything extra to charity. You all own only one home. You’ve never taken advantage of private planes. You don’t have any cool stuff that cost a lot of money—things the rest of us couldn’t afford in our wildest dreams.  And the people in Washington who would have the power to tax us for health care are all totally modest in money matters and lifestyle as well.  Umm, how shall I put this…?  Oh I know:

SHUT THE HELL UP. Neither you nor Congress has a shred of credibility when it comes to spending your money or anyone else’s.

And while you’re ripping the health insurance companies a new one for not looking out for people’s best interests, pull your heads out of your backsides long enough to consider that the government ain’t exactly an angel of mercy. Two words: 1) gullible; 2) complicit. Look them up. You’re one or the other right now, and neither is an attractive option.

Do insurance companies ration, Hollywood?  Of course they do. That’s hardly any secret. But then, I’m guessing none of you gets the basic principle that the when you have a limited pot of financial resources—known in the insurance industry that you seem to know almost nothing about as premiums—you have to make choices about what that finite supply of funds will cover. The government will operate on a very similar principle. They’ll just bankrupt a lot of people along the way. Once it has collected as much tax revenue as the population can bear, the government will make decisions about what care it will and won’t cover, for whom, and when. In any system of health care, rationing exists. In fact, there is no such thing as a health care system without rationing. It’s merely a question of who does the rationing. With medical savings account models, guess what?  YOU get to do it.  That seems like a pretty good idea to me. But hey, if you trust the government to decide what’s best for you and everyone else—which may mean that what’s best for you is no treatment because someone else merits the expense more than you—feel free to get on their list. The feds are always looking for people they can tell what to do. I'm sure they have a sign-up sheet somewhere.

Oh, by the way, at least insurance companies usually have real doctors helping them to make the rationing choices they employ. It's pretty much looking like the “public option” will elevate Washington D.C. bureaucrats as medical decision-makers. And they, like you, Hollywood, won’t have the slightest clue as to the difference between a fist and a fistula. 

The final nail in this little video’s coffin?  Thomas Lennon saying, “And I’m not being sarcastic. Not at all.” 

Big news. I studied theatre. One of the first things they teach you?  Never insult the intelligence of your audience. 

Uh oh…

Game over.

You lose, Funny or Die.

And as you’ve framed it, that leaves you only one other option.

The mortuary has already been notified.

Posted: Friday - September 25, 2009 at 11:25 AM