Politics
The character of the Penguin, particularly as portrayed by Burgess Meredith, has often been used as a theme to mock public figures that supposedly resemble him. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, has made numerous references comparing former Vice President Dick Cheney with the Penguin, including a laugh similar to the one heard in the 1960s Batman series. In a similar manner, Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, called Franklin D. Roosevelt a criminal and told his audience to "ask Batman" "if they don't believe him," showing a picture of Meredith as the Penguin next to one of the former President; Roosevelt and the penguin are both pictured wearing a monocle and sporting a cigarette holder, suggesting a resemblance. Cheney was mocked in a similar capacity on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, while The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson chose to imitate John McCain with Meredith's Penguin laugh.
In May 2006, a Republican-led PR firm, DCI Group, created a YouTube video making fun of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. The video portrayed Gore as the Penguin using one of his trick umbrellas to hypnotize a flock of penguins into believing in the existence of global warming and climate change.
Read more about this topic: The Penguin
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
—George Washington (1732–1799)
“All is politics in this capital.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)