Before NBC began frantically pulling it off YouTube -- in an apparent attempt to forestall any awareness of its programming among people under 40 -- today's hottest viral video was the clip from last night's Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien of William Shatner reading Sarah Palin's farewell speech. (The clip is still available on the NBC web site so I've embedded it below on the off chance you haven't seen it.) At the risk of offending every one of my Facebook friends who posted it, the bit simply wasn't funny. That's not just my opinion, it's a provable fact, and if the target hadn't been one we're by now completely conditioned to laugh at, everyone would have seen it.
The problem isn't that the punchline doesn't land (though Shatner does seem a bit shaky at times) but rather that the premise is all wrong. Introducing the performance, Conan declares that he's watched the speech a few times and "it suddenly dawned on me this morning: it's a poem! It was always meant to be a poem."
Except that... it really was always meant to be a poem. OK, not a exactly a poem, but definitely poetic.
...with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins.
What did Conan think that was, a policy speech? All the flowery language that Shatner goofs on is supposed to be flowery. Some of it is literally about flowers. Palin's speech isn't inadvertently poetic the way that Donald Rumsfeld's press conferences or Lindsay Lohan's interviews are. Those gags work because there is a surprising result from presenting ordinary, discombobulated language in verse form. Palin's speech announcing her resignation probably could have been treated the same way effectively. But her actual farewell speech is in itself intentionally poetic.
Sure her imagery is hacky, her construction is inelegant, and her delivery is choppy. And there's the oddity of a politician attempting to speak poetically when she is quitting her job and pretending that it's normal. But to say, "Ha! It sounds like a poem!" when that was the intent makes Conan, not Palin, sound like the dummy.
