Comedian Will Ferrell is going to the well one more time—some might say returning to his own vomit—in taking his once-amusing Saturday Night Live impression of President George W. Bush to the Broadway stage in an upcoming one-man show, Will Ferrell: You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W. Bush.
Ferrell and his associates have said the show will have a narrative instead of comprising a series of sketches. The play "will surprise people with its twists and turns and what it has to say about Bush," according to AP. Among those would-be surprises may be a scene or scenes in which Ferrell takes the stage naked, according to the print version of Entertainment Weekly magazine.
Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels has said that the Bush impersonation stopped being funny three or four years ago, but Ferrell and his team are pressing on undaunted by that particular consideration.
Previews of the production will begin on Inauguration Day, January 20, and the show will open February 5. A live feed of the performance is planned for March 14 on HBO—if there are enough people sufficiently stupid and possessed of appallingly poor taste to sustain it until then.
Which there undoubtedly are.
—S. T. Karnick
Joe–Stone’s W cost $25,100,000 to make, plus millions of dollars in marketing and distribution costs. It brought in $25,517,500 in the United States and another $3 million in the rest of the world. That is a rather poor box office performance for such a widely promoted and highly anticipated film.
S.T., for some reason,I was thinking of Vaughn Meader while reading this piece.
Didn’t Oliver Stone’s W, which was released last October tank in the box office?
I think that your characterization of this phenomenon as tracing back to 1960s socialist pamphlets is a good one, Mike. The same attitudes bring on similarly infantile actions.
Sam:
Will Ferrell’s shtick fits the pattern: The “humor” of these so-called “liberals” almost always degenerates sooner or later — and it’s usually sooner — into scatological commentary.
The infantile disrespect for constituted authority “liberals” evince at every turn offers support for the thesis that their “philosophies” (to give them an unduly respectable name) have their foundation in the emotions without consorting with the rational aspects of human personality.
They use words only emotively, without reference to their meaning. Babies do that on a regular basis.
I remember back in college seeing socialist publications from Europe with their caricature covers displaying then well-known public personages naked, priapically over-endowed, both to humiliate them and criticize them for exercising their constitutionally-designated powers, as if to say they were overcompensating for their sexual inadequacies by deploying nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to Europe as a counter-move to Soviet expansionism.
Will Ferrell’s “humor” easily falls into that category.
Best regards,
Mike