Not that you’d know it by living or working here, but Washington, DC is apparently full of funny people. And not just any funny people — funny celebrities. This according to the folks who put on the The Funniest Celebrity in Washington Contest. Now in its 12th year, the 2005 version will feature a wide range of contestants: Joe Scarborough, Reps. Linda Sanchez and Brian Baird, Grover Norquist, Andrew Sullivan, Clarence Page and Wonkette among them. Tickets for the October 19 event start at $250 a pop.

Now for the most part I’ve nothing against these people, and I’m not here to bag on the premise of the event because it seems to raise a good deal of money for some good charities. Bravo in that regard. And some of them might be very funny. (Wonkette is, Sullivan can be, and Baird is rumored to be.) But I will state emphatically that none of these people is a celebrity in any sense of the word, and we should disavow each other right now of any notion that they are anything but simply better known and better paid than you and me.

Now if my point was solely that politicians and the people who feed off of them are not celebrities, then I’d simply be repeating a truism. My point, though, is not about politicians or journalists per se, but about Washington in general. It seems we are right now a federal district completely devoid of celebrity.

George W. Bush, our best hope, is in no way a celebrity. He becomes a celebrity every August when he retreats to his Crawford, Tx. ranch and is pursued by media throngs who hover on his every bicycling accident, but a month or so later he returns to his un-celebrity in the nation’s capital, content to count sheep by 9 p.m.

Don Rumsfeld may have enjoyed fleeting celebrity during the early stages of this Gulf War — what with the media adoring his schizophrenic self-interrogating press conferences — but that act wore thin, and any celebrity he may have experienced has long since evaporated.

Bill Clinton was certainly a DC celebrity of the first order, and was our last true celebrity (p)resident. His wife has many of the makings and enjoys the trappings of celebrity, but even if she were to occupy the White House at some later date, she will always be to the majority of people known as Bill Clinton’s wife, or at best a niche celebrity (like Dennis Kucinich or G. Gordon Liddy).

Leaving the elected world, while DC’s sports scene seems on the upswing, our sports figures are unknowns. Jaromir Jagr and Michael Jordan have long since fled town, no one could name a Nationals player if their life depended on it, and the Redskins are utterly without a star player, even as Joe Gibbs’s celebrity star has flamed out mercilessly since his return last season.

Who else is there? I’ve seen people like Chris Matthews and Tim Russert buy six-packs of beer (and assume George Will can buy a bottle of Pinot Noir) without so much as a do-I-know-you? look from the cashier, while Tony Kornheiser’s national fame (through his show on ESPN) has come at the expense of his local celebrity (he claims to have been unknowingly named something like sportswriter emeritus at the Washington Post this week).

So where does this leave us? Frankly, I’m not sure any of this matters one damn bit. In this town celebrities tend to get things done. Unfortunately much of the doing that goes on in DC ends up screwing us and the rest of the country. So maybe we should just embrace our lack of celebrity residents, and hold our breath when the occasional one comes to town from New York, London or LA. After all, it’s fun to watch DC’s politicians and journalists — our purported celebrities — fawn all over the real thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 at 10:47 pm by Baylen Linnekin and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.