With the debates coming up, there’s a lot of speculation about whether Joe Biden can stay upright for 90 minutes (he’s been practicing), what will happen to him without his friend the TelePrompter, and how long his uppers will last. We all know that he’s a puppet president. I’ll try to convince you that the American people’s willingness to accept such a poor presidential performance is a byproduct of television, beginning in the 1950s, having so degraded our expectations about quality that we’ll accept any garbage as decent. Believe it or not, I’m going to use musicals to make my point.

Before movies or television, there was vaudeville. The nature of vaudeville was that it was a traveling show, with performers wandering across America. The bad acts got left by the side of the railroad, or they got better. Surviving acts improved because they honed their acts, doing them over and over in every small town until they’d removed entirely the things that didn’t work and perfected the things that did.

When movies got sound, they first did musicals—indeed, the first talkie was a musical starring one of the most popular vaudevillian and Broadway stars in America. You may not like Al Jolson, but he was an incredibly accomplished performer by the standards of his day, with swivel hips that Elvis would envy:

During the Depression, Americans were desperate for uplifting songs and dances. The early musicals, as the studios were figuring out sound, were static and dull, but by the early 1930s, the studios were figuring it out—and one of the things they figured out was that vaudeville and Broadway had quality performers and directors who were doing eight shows a week, week in and week out.

As one early example, look at Marion Stadler and Don Rose in this act from the King of Jazz (1930). Whether you like their style or not, they honed their act to perfection on the vaudeville circuit:

Once Hollywood figured out musicals’ potential, it poured money into them, and the goal was perfection. Again, you don’t have to like the style, but you can’t deny that Fred and Ginger achieved something close to perfection here:

We see this level of quality in one musical number after another over the next two decades:

No matter how stupid the plots (and, with rare exceptions, the plots were insanely stupid), the dance quality was exceptional.

Things changed dramatically with the advent of television. It’s not just that musicals went out of style. It’s also that audience expectations about what was good sank dramatically (which may help explain the musicals’ demise). Two things caused this decline.

First, just as movies once looked to vaudeville for acts, television looked to the movies. However, a lot of the stars who showed up on television were past their prime, way past their prime. By 1971, 35 years after the exquisite dance, above, this is what Ginger Rogers was doing:

That’s just embarrassing, but it was par for the course for television. Adults tolerated it because they were older, too, and these were the beloved performers of their youths. Meanwhile, growing numbers of young people thought that this pathetic garbage was what entertainment was supposed to look like.

The other reason all these television performances were awful is that, while vaudeville and movies allowed performers to have intense rehearsals spanning years or, at least, weeks, television had no such leeway. Performers might have had only a couple of days to master a “shtick.” That’s how you ended up with his horrible stuff:

The same degradation continues today thanks to the wonders of lip-syncing, AutoTune, and quick cuts.  

For those unfamiliar with these things, here’s a whole video of lip sync fails:

Here’s what poor Britney Spears sounds like without AutoTune:

And here is a damaged puppet propped up with quick cuts:

Anyone else notice this clip has 5 cuts (edits) in it ? That means it took Joe Biden 5 takes to get a 13 second clip right. 🤦pic.twitter.com/cqZ1viodPe

— CannaKingCA 🇮🇱🇺🇸 (@CannaKingCA20) May 15, 2024

See, I told you I’d get around to politics. Over the decades, we’ve been programmed to accept as adequate politicians who can’t orate off the cuff, need people constantly speaking on their behalf (the political equivalent of lip-syncing), and must be hidden behind a screen of electronic artifice.

Part of Trump’s charm is that he’ll talk for 90 minutes without teleprompters, mouthpieces, and electronic corrections. He is utterly real and very good at being real. Trump is the political equivalent of an exquisitely polished vaudeville act, while Biden is a barely sentient fossil, even as we’re still expected to applaud like trained monkeys to acknowledge the fact that he’s still capable of a shadow of his former act.

Our puppet president by AI.