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Noting that Bill Maher's Religulous beat out David Zucker's An American Carol this weekend, Matt Yglesias says that the moviegoing demographic tilts young and childless and urban, and note, "the big screen audience for what looks like a witless screed against God is just a lot bigger than the big screen audience for what looks like a witless screed against Michael Moore." That seems about right. On the other hand, there's something a little bit more interesting about a movie taking on God than a movie taking on a plump documentarian. And I say that as someone who finds both movies aggressively uninteresting. But I can't figure out why Zucker went with a parody of Moore. Why someone as aggressively self-parodic and powerless as Moore? David Weigel offers this hypothesis:
Political comedy mocks authority. Conservative comedy in the Age of Bush venerates authority. The “heavies” that corrupt Malone and (temporarily) ruin the lives of his conservative extended family are powerless, silly activists. Malone simply gets slapped around a bit and decides the establishment was right. If you transported Zucker back to 1978 and pitched him Animal House, he’d direct Niedermeyer: Man of Iron.On the other hand, it could be that there's not much of a market for movies that don't look very good, or offer very interesting premises. Thank You For Smoking took on somewhat more relevant sacred cows, and posted a respectable $25 million domestic gross. So there is an audience for this sort of thing. Presumably the "liberal" media or academia would offer richer grounds for parody. But seriously, Michael Moore?
