Kicking Over My Traces

The Tonight Show is at the wrong end of the day for me. I could record it, but watching Conan while eating lunch seems out-of-place.

That is by way of explanation that I must offer a tip of the hat to the always awake Kathryn Jean Lopez for this clip from last night:

A trained, experienced, often histrionic actor, William Shatner delivers an amusing dramatic reading of a handful of snippets from Sarah Palin’s recently published (and bestselling) autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life accompanied by a musical trio.

Trained as a journalist, experienced as a politician, ornery and often folksy in word and manner, Sarah Palin stands toe-to-toe with Captain Kirk, T.J. Hooker and Denny Crane to deliver a spot-on dramatic reading of a handful of snippets from Shatner’s autobiography.

An interesting difference: Shatner better uses his copy of her book as a prop, opening the book while reading from a TelePrompter. Palin makes no effort to open her prop book.

A small piece of “acting business,” but small pieces sell a performance.

Palin is a natural.

Shatner is professional and polished.

And all of this is way too much time and effort spent over a funny bit from The Tonight Show.

Postscript: how tall is Conan O’Brien?

According to imdb, O’Brien is 6’4″ (1.93m).

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Tags: Conan O'Brien, Denny Crane, Going Rogue: An American Life, sarah palin, tonight show, William Shatner

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 6:54 am +0000 GMT and is filed under Books, Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.