Appearances

 That post that I wrote a few days back about how Bob Saget may not have been the iconic role model of a dad that he appeared on Full House? Well, upon reflection, none of this should be any kind of shock.

At all. 

Let's take the lovable cad Joe Garrelli on News Radio. As played by the not nearly so lovable Joe Rogan, his character is described as the "street-smart electrician and handyman." His character had a deep mistrust of consumer products, preferring instead to piece together his won contraptions, while periodically spouting bizarre conspiracy theories. So much so that the rest of the characters on the show suspected that he might be the Unabomber. 

Okay. So sometimes there is a pretty close parallel between the characters they played on TV and the actors who portrayed them. The scariest part is that Joe Rogan's wild conspiracy theory chatter is now more than three times more popular than Tucker Carlson's rants. Which pushes us through the looking glass into the realm where Stephen Colbert's eponymous show starring himself on Comedy Central was "just a character." The narcissistic right wing commentator had to be put on a shelf when the "real" Stephen Colbert got his job hosting The Late Show on CBS. Are you still with me? Then let's go just a little further down this twisted path to the case of Alex Jones, who during his divorce trial insisted that the conspiracy-mongering host of InfoWars podcast was (wait for it) "just a character." 

So, maybe Shakespeare was even more right than he could have imagined. We are all just players on this world stage, and some of us have really interesting roles to play. And maybe some of us are more method than others. Which wouldn't be a problem if we were all pretending to be nice, clever people. That would be nice. Unfortunately, we seem to have way too many folks whose "characters" are not very kind and not very bright. And they seem to be the ones we end up giving all this attention. 

And money. 

Would it be any sort of relief to discover, after all these years, that Donald Trump was really some guy named Don Gleeson, who managed to turn his night club act about a cartoonish lout of a New York slumlord into an empire? 

And what about Bill Cosby? 

Stay tuned.