A smug buffoon with a mean streak, overmatched by events and by the role he’s taken on: One gets the feeling that Will Ferrell’s take on George W. Bush isn’t exactly a stretch for the comedian.
Ferrell’s (almost) one-man show, You’re Welcome America, is something less than a play but something more than an extended Saturday Night Live skit. There is much in it that is lamentable—because unfunny—but it’s not exactly a tedious Michael Moore philippic, either, and at least one right-winger from Texas laughed most of the way through it. What’s strangest is the impression that Ferrell’s performance is a parody of a parody, a cartoon of a cartoon. Bush is a reserved individual, and the media have never been much interested in constructing a deep (even nuanced?) account of the man or his ideas. The Bush we know, the mediated Bush of MSNBC and the New York Times, is already a caricature, and it is this caricature, not the conflicted man who served twice as president of the United States, that Ferrell inhabits.
But how he inhabits it! There is a kind of cracked genius to Ferrell’s Bush, from the strut and the loose-jointed body language to the cubist locution. Ferrell uses this gift mostly for the broadest sort of comedy—now augmented with copious profanity and pornographic imagery; Broadway ain’t the family hour on NBC—but he can, it turns out, also use it for genuine dramatic effect. Ferrell performs a momentarily solemn monologue, apparently derived from Bush’s interview with John Draper, in which the president confesses, “I do a lot of crying in this job. I’ll bet I’ve shed more tears than you can count, as president.” And as he considers the awful costs of war and the uncertainty of judgment, Ferrell’s Bush looks and sounds uncannily like the man himself. But this is Will Ferrell, so the moment ends abruptly and it’s back to explorations of “western grip” sex acts.
And that’s as human as Ferrell’s portrayal gets. Ferrell’s grotesquery can be a lot of fun, and the ritual denunciation of those who seek power is a virtuous republican pastime. But the thinness of Bush the punchline (as opposed to Bush the man) is also Ferrell’s great limitation. You can do only so many Yale cheerleader sodomy jokes, and he does them all. And the more Ferrell aspires to a substantive political critique, the less funny he is. Ferrell’s Bush may be a buffoon, but he has at his command a suspiciously precise set of statistics, into which he frequently delves for the purpose of making himself look bad, for example to inform the audience that 98.2 percent (or somesuch) of the casualties in Iraq happened after the now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech.
This Bush is a details guy.
Ferrell isn’t. He has Bush prattling at some length about connecting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to 9/11, as though the actual George W. Bush had not publicly declared, repeatedly, that Iraq was not involved in that particular act of terrorism. It is not clear whether Hollywood liberals feel obliged to misconstrue the Iraq
casus belli for reasons of rhetorical convenience or whether they simply do not understand the argument, even after lo these many years. One suspects that the latter is closer to the truth. Maybe the world would be better off if the hard calls were left in the hands of the cast of
Saturday Night Live, Oprah, Bono, and Sting. (Maybe not.) But a political satirist who does not understand his subject is bound to fail, which is why Ferrell is doubly blessed by his gift for slapstick.
You’re Welcome America isn’t quite a one-man show. There’s an interlude in which Condoleezza Rice (played by Pia Glenn)—reduced, predictably, to a sort of Cleopatra Jones blaxploitation figure—does a seductive number that is equal parts pole dance and minstrel show, reminding us that Rice remains one of the few black Americans whom white Americans feel comfortable humiliating racially and sexually. And Will Ferrell takes frequent breaks from lampooning Bush-dynasty nepotism to turn the stage over to his less accomplished brother, Patrick, who plays Bush’s Secret Service bodyguard, break-dancing between segments.
Ferrell is at his best when his jocky Bush is sneering at Al Gore as a nerd, embarking on daft tangents about having a barbecue with Bigfoot, or putting together a team of trained Moroccan monkeys to fight in Iraq (Operation Primate Speargun:
Semper En Obscurus). And toward the end of the program, as Bush bequeathed nicknames to the audience—he christened one “
Chupacabra”—a tedious woman in the better seats attempted to hijack the show to make a political speech of her own about some local concern in New York State. Ferrell didn’t break character and instead talked her down with a show of
nucular-grade annoyance that some of us would like to have seen the real-life president use with his real-life hecklers in the White House press corps. The audience reacted to this episode with contempt for the poor woman and her pitiful concerns. Who was she to go mixing up comedy and politics? Who did she think she was? Helen Thomas? The guy who starred in
Elf?
— Kevin Williamson is a deputy managing editor of National Review.
