Chicken analysts and Herschel Walker gags: Late night makes sense of midterm results
What do the results of the midterm elections mean for America? Here’s what we know so far. Photo: AP.
Herschel Walker — and that’s what we all called him, because that’s what we’d come to know him as — was a famous man of late night in the 1980s and early 1990s, and he had a storied career in television in which he made his name on sitcoms such as Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
This is the guy who was late to the game when the “Morning Joe” crowd took over the late-night talk show airwaves in 2008 and 2010, but he was just about the best there is, both to talk about and to listen to. His own late-night talk show, Walker, talked the talk, if not of actual politics, then at least of politics, because, as he often said, he got paid well enough to buy a lot of whiskey and not to worry about politics.
Walker, born in Texas but raised in Arkansas, made his big name as a talker when his show was on Comedy Central. He was the most respected, most intelligent, and most consistently funny man on any news scene where comedy was the genre. He also became the most well-liked and most well-respected person in the conservative movement, and he still is, more than a decade later.
So of course, when Donald Trump got into the White House, Walker’s show was the one that was on in full force to promote the now-president because he was on all the other talk shows and CNN. His show, which he hosted from 1984 to 1996, was a forum for political comedy; a place to talk about the issues and the world the way other people talked in the 80s and 90s. This was not an angry-man show, but a show about people laughing at the problems of the world; a show about why it was important to make fun of the world as much as and, ideally, more than anyone else.
Herschel Walker (left), president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, and Richard C.