Courtesy of this wonderful, gaylarious survey of Jon Stewart’s greatest gay moments, I came across this clip of Stewart dealing with the whole Larry Craig in the bathroom incident by interspersing his commentary with audio clips of Craig explaining how he accidentally tapped the foot of the undercover cop in the stall next to him ("I’m a fairly wide guy"), and with musical commentary from an R. Kelly-esque R&B singer standing behind him.
The brilliance of this synthesis–between the denied homosexuality of the conservative politician and the crooning of the hyper-sexualized black man, mediated by the wry disbelief of the jewish joker-intellectual– goes even deeper, I think, that Stewart and his writers realize. It has something to do, and I’m on rather thin theoretical ice here (an inevitable consequence of reading too much Leslie Fiedler), with the continued suppresion of two fo the primordial loves that are at the root of the tortured American psyche — that of men for other men, and that of white men for black men.
