The opposite of Bernie Sanders

Dressed up like Bernie Sanders, Larry David on SNL looked and sounded almost exactly like Bernie Sanders. But that's not why he was funny. Or rather, that's only half of why he was funny. 

In his public persona at least, Sanders focuses relentlessly on problems that in his telling threaten the future of American democracy and humanity itself: galloping income inequality and climate change. Larry David's humor focuses relentlessly on life's trivialities: tuck or don't tuck your shirt, slip a water bottle into a theater, suffer the consequences of  new pants tenting around the crotch.

The joke was that David looked and sounded like Sanders but acted (or thought) like Larry David's character on Curb Your Enthusiasm. 

David did spoof Sanders on the big picture: We're doomed! But it was funny precisely because he made no distinction between the momentous and the trivial:

Eh, not a fan of the banks. They trample on the middle class. They control Washington. And why do they chain all their pens to the desks? Who's trying to steal a pen from a bank? It makes no sense!

(Re)birth and (forecast) death of a genre

Chris Beam's inspired bit of ventriloquism, imagining What if political scientists covered the news?, has swiftly inspired a spinoff spoof by Conor Friedersdorf in which, as Jonathan Chait retitles it, "A Sociologist Covers the News." Chait groans, "I foresee a progressively less-amusing internet trope" -- a preemptive strike against a newborn bloggy genre within a week of its apparent birth.

Not to worry. Every literary birth is a rebirth. Beam's "What if political scientists covered the news?" is good son to Woody Allen's If the impressionists had been dentists" (1978):

Dear Theo
Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding. Mrs Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth. That's right! I can't work to order like a common tradesman. I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing and wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset becuase it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her. I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. She claims she can't chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, I can't go on like this much longer! I asked Cezanne if he would share an office with me but he is old and infirm and unable to hold the instruments and they must be tied to his wrists but then he lacks accuracy and once inside a mouth, he knocks out more teeth than he saves. What to do?
Vincent 

Compare Beam: