With his politically sharp, racially charged comedy, Alonzo Bodden is the Dick Gregory for our time. On his concert DVD Who’s Paying Attention, the stand-up comic takes aim at many issues while returning to the performance’s motif: the incompetence of our news media. “Can you imagine Walter Cronkite putting up with Sarah Palin. He’d say, ‘Bitch, read a book. We’re done!’”
The celebrity besotted fodder that fills much of the media galls Bodden, whether movie stars pitching for charity or politician endowed with star status. “Sarah Palin is the Paris Hilton of politics. She’s hot, she’s dumb and she won’t go away.”
Not that Bodden is particularly obsessed with Alaska’s most infamous private citizen. He makes good-natured jokes about a recent trip to Ireland (the whitest country in the world?) and last year’s gatecrashers at a White House state dinner. He suggests the TSA should man the perimeter around the executive mansion. Nothing would get throughespecially if it’s a water bottle over the legal size limit. But then it’s back to a media that delivers a succession of fear-based stories with no follow-up, a cyclopean media that can only focus on one thing at a time. “You know how happy the chairman of Toyota was when BP started that oil spill?” he asks. Bodden’s often-hilarious monologue is proof that someone in the entertainment world is still trying to make audiences think.
