I kind of have the feeling that it was a fun notion but built
up into something a bit bigger and longer-run than the incident really
justified.  It's fun when a mayor of an insulted city takes umbrage and
fights back, but this sort of thing is also kind of the imitation of a
controversy, without the risk of anyone really coming out looking worse
for the experience.  

        After all, while it's dangerous to argue with critics, Booker
could not come out looking bad for complaining about a cheap joke sent
Newark's way: his constituents, to the extent they cared, would take a
natural bit of pride at being stuck up for.  (And it doesn't hurt that
New Jersey is, in the words of a comical atlas which was released at the
same time as The Onion's Our Dumb World, and which I failed to pick up
at the time and probably will never see again, the most self-defensive
state in the Union.)  It plays well for him.  And it plays well for
Conan, too, in that he gets to have one joke spun out and repeated and
talked about and to feed into other natural laugh lines, such as the
'horror' of being banned from Newark Airport.  Hear the idea and you
have a smile already.  

        (The real menace in being banned from Newark, by the way, would
not be having to go through JFK; it would be having to go through
La Guardia.)  

        And then in the resolution and the shaking of hands and smiling
everybody comes off looking good.  (OK, better than good; I hadn't
considered that Booker had any particular charities, and a donation
like that helps everybody look better.)  It's happy all around, but it
did mean that even with the 'escalation' of things there wasn't the
sense that actual blood might be drawn.  Now, that's fine; but, it did
mean that as long as the events weren't getting more ridiculous, such
as the 'toilet seat of communities' Conan declared to be with him, that
it was just padding to try to suggest the feud meant anything.  The
stretch between Clinton's 'intervention' and Booker's appearance was
anticlimax, and hyping it just brought to the center the drifting
nature of that stretch.  

        Overall, I think it started out pretty fun, but got a bit too
much play when its story had played out and that chipped away the fun.  

--
                                                                Joseph Nebus
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