A cell of Huffington Post bloggers are reportedly sharing a stage this Friday, March 16th with two Islamic and two white supremacist terrorists, an anonymous Department of Homeland Security spokesperson alleged today.
The bloggers - whose credits range from Talladega Nights to the New Yorker magazine to The Simpsons -- are attending the hit musical The Beastly Bombing in Los Angeles at the Steve Allen Theater on Friday night, after which they'll join Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff and Beastly writer/director Julien Nitzberg and composer/musical director Roger Neill onstage in a panel discussion called "Laughter As A Weapon - Comedy and Politics in the Post-9/11 World." Further investigation has revealed that members of the public can attend by purchasing tickets from a designated website.
HuffPost and the irreverent operetta have longtime ties, beginning with an early review of the show that hailed it as "the first great work of comedy to emerge from the post-9/11 little planet of horrors." In a front page Arts & Leisure section feature called "A Very Model Of A Modern Meta-Musical," the New York Times described the show as "a buddy comedy about white supremacists and members of Al-Qaeda who meet while attempting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, all set to jaunty melodies evocative of Gilbert and Sullivan." Other characters include a dancing gay Jesus, a lovable pedophile priest, and two dope crazy, fraternal twin daughters of the President of the United States.
The Beastly Bombing has also generated outrage and controversy, with one critic denouncing it as "theater that revels in evil" and a West Bank settler accusing the production of being masterminded by "another self-hating bunch of Jews."
A covert press release states that the panel will "explore the role of satire in society with a special focus on comedy as a tool for social commentary." Other scheduled topics range from "Are non-mainstream viewpoints easier to digest through comedic storytelling or does satire polarize debate by highlighting the extremes of behavior and thought?" to "Is Ann Coulter a satirist or a bigot - or both?"
The panelists are all Huffposters, including filmmaker Adam McKay (Talladega Nights), television writer Bill Diamond (Murphy Brown), playwright/novelist Seth Greenland (The Bones), TV writer/producer Tim Long (The Simpsons), author and New Yorker contributor Paul Slansky, self-aggrandizing urinal attendant Michael Simmons, and other special guests.
One nameless participant urged Los Angeles theatergoers to attend Friday or face the consequences. "You're either in the audience," he ominously warned, "or you're with the terrorists."