the chutry experiment

What is up Atrios's ass? That is so lame. Loved the Huckabees remix, btw.

I think "political" here means "having to do with the news," where "news" means important matters and not the tabloid crap JibJab is mocking. And maybe it's "political" in another sense, that the Sadaam video made Bush and his administration look bad. It had political utility.

It wasn't just Atrios. Many of his commenters were also hating on the Jib Jab kids.

Seeing the videos in terms of "political utility" makes sense. Maybe I'm having trouble with the fact that they compiled so many different kinds of content, including "videos" of unaltered content that initially appeared on TV (Colbert, Stewart). I *like* most of those videos, but the categorization seemed a little broad to me.

The Huckabees remix is great. There's also a trance version (as well as a number of other interesting responses), but the hip hop version is far better.

I felt that many people embraced "This Land" because of its criticism of Bush. As they did so, they overlooked the ways in which it reinforced right-wing, Fox News memes against Kerry.

From a liberal perspective, the latest JibJab video is a joke: yes, it's a problem that cable news programs have replaced anchors with bimbos, and that they spend more time on Anna Nicole than on Darfur. But a far more serious problem (at least from where I stand) is the fact that cable news repeats political spin without contextualization or criticism, that it has been manipulated by the media-conscious Bush administration in a thousand different ways, and that Beltway journalists are ensconced in the same bubble of privilege as the politicians they cover.

JibJab covers none of this, and instead goes for the low-hanging fruit. That's fine, but let's not talk about JibJab as if it were performing some kind of radical (or even radically funny) critique of its subjects: it mostly repeats conventional wisdom on whatever topic it parodies. In this, it is like a parody of a parody.

Matt, you're right, of course, to point out that the latest Jib Jab video isn't critical enough of the news media, especially on a structural level. And, honestly, I didn't find it nearly as funny or interesting as "This Land" or "Big Box Mart," but their videos are probably a bit of a guilty pleasure for me at this point.

I think I was aware of "This Land's" political problems because I'd taught the video at Georgia Tech in a course focused on the 2004 election and was (only mildly) surprised to find that my conservative students liked it as much (or more) than I did because it reinforced their views of the election and the candidates.

And more recently, when discussing the Jib Jab videos, I ended up criticizing them for reinforcing a cynicism towards politics that I find somewhat unproductive. But yeah, they're far from radical, certainly not nearly critical enough.

I just wanted to add, Chuck, that JibJab's attempts to spread the blame across the political spectrum make it the comedic equivalent of Crossfire -- and I think it deserves the same type of criticism that Jon Stewart directed at CNN's show.

Overall, I find JibJab to be overly reductive. However, I think that it might be useful to think about that reductiveness as a way of distilling and thinking further about larger memes, since it seems to replicate them so well.

The "Crossfire" analogy makes sense. I do think the Jib Jab videos at least have the benefit of being funnier than Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, but by spreading blame equally across the political spectrum, they also contribute to the cynicism that Stewart was trying to criticize.

Your second point, about Jib Jab's complicity in replicating political memes, is an interesting one, and it might b something I think about when I write on viral political videos (a project that's on my to-do list).