Finally, I Understand Carson Daly

I work part-time for Satan at a New York advertising agency. . . . Satan has sent me to Los Angeles, where I am supposed to be helping my Satanic co-minions make a television commercial. . . .

The hotel at which we are staying is typical of Los Angeles: the arrogant clientele with their ironic facial hair, the raucous lobby with its ironic furniture, the inadequate overcrowded lobby bar meticulously designed by homosexual males for heterosexual males to comfortably solicit transsexual prostitutes. None of this, mind you, bothers me nearly so much as the televisions. You cannot escape television here—they're in the bar, in the lobby, in the bathrooms. . . . Worst of all, though, is the one in my hotel room, which is hidden inside an armoire, but which housekeeping insists on turning on for me every afternoon, so that when I return from a long day of staggering vapidity and irretrievably wasted human energy, the 27-inch bottomless well of suicide incentives is shrieking at me before I've even entered the room. I need to have a sign made for the front door: We don't swim in your toilet, please don't turn on our television. . . .

I returned to my hotel room the first evening to discover a program on MTV where people insult one another's mothers; afterwards, the crowd cheers, and a prize is awarded to the contestant deemed most vitriolic. I have a mother myself, so I can certainly understand the impulse, but the contestants on this program are insulting the other's mothers—seeming, as unlikely as may it seem, to be defending their own. I know that this program is supposed to be rebellious and ironic and In My Face (a claim I might be persuaded to believe if the object was to insult your own mother), but as it stands, I can't imagine anything more desperate and needy; to craft a convenient analogy, the television is the hotel bar, MTV is the transsexual prostitute, the "outrageous" contestant the john on his knees doing his best to service her.

I know what you're thinking, because I'm thinking it, too: MTV has got a lot better since the last time I watched it.