In our post-modern society almost everything gets parodied. While started on a grand level, with the likes of Mel Brooks and the Zucker brothers, the real explosion of it was with the rise of the internet. Finally, parody can happen on a consumer level basis. No longer did you have to have the fame of a Lonely Island to be popular; you just needed a camera, internet access, and a few buddies. Countless things have been parodied, and one that has been left out is late night talk shows. Why? Because you need real stars.

While Wayne's World was a good start, late night, a show with a format idiosyncratic up to the point of self-parody, was widely unparodied, and, thus, accepted. As we further blur the lines, we sometimes forget that parody is satire, and satire is making fun of something while seeing the truth, or falsity, in it. However, people went on loving late night talk without seeing its downfalls, which are as manipulative as almost anything else in the media.

Speaking of which, this has not been a good year for the mainstream media. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have publicly denounced it, and many average Americans have followed suit, whether it's for reasons legitimate or illegitimate. Sifting through these reasons, one can find the basic principle that the media tells us what the news is. It tells us what we have to care about even if it isn't what we should care about. Is the fact that CEOs are storing un-taxed money in banks overseas an issue? It isn't because there were three stabbings in Queens yesterday because that was in the news. Think about that term: "the news." "The news" doesn't mean the literally news; it means the 5 o'clock or 11 o'clock news.

So as the media tells us what the news is, late night tells us how we should talk. While it does seem abstract, let me break it down. Sifting through the minutia, soap operas, comedy shows, and reality shows, while millions of Americans do watch that dialogue, they understand that it isn't real, and as long as they understand that, they can go on and watch that with no issues from me or anyone else. The only real outlet on television where we see real people talking about real stuff--or at least we think we do--is on talk shows. Because we don't have that filter that goes "okay, just remember this isn't real", we allow ourselves to see these talk shows and see them as an ideal. "These people are on tv and they're famous and they talk like we talk but about different things and in a different way, so this is how I should talk." This is subconsciously what we think during each commercial break where the product that the guest is plugging gets sponsored.

If you see what I'm getting at here, it's that, for the most part, this isn't real talking. The guests are trying to impress the host and America as well as plug whatever product they have, and the host is reverting to talking points given by an employee of the studio. Don't forget that there are time constraints and a rating that limits the content of their conversations. While doing this, there are also social cues, restraints, fears; a conversation in front of millions of people is just inherently going to be different than a conversation in front of your dinner table. However, it just comes off so sincere that it seems natural, even if we know that most of these people are actors. It's no surprise that Jimmy Fallon used to be an actor before he was a late night host.

That's why talk show not only could be parodied; they need to be. But why hadn't it up until the Eric Andre show? The answer is in the accessibility of the consumer-cum-satirist. Talk shows are, in themselves, a kind of post-modern thing. They came after fame; they couldn't come before it. It would be considered kind of pathetic to interview your neighbor who just installed their new pool in the backyard; it has the triviality of issues that Leslie Knope had to face in Parks and Recreation. Therefore, one must achieve fame before the can essentially make fun of it. Satirizing of talk shows can not happen at a consumer level because the dichotomy between consumer and entertainer are still what they are at in the Jimmy Carson days.

That's why it could not have gone as differently as it did with Eric Andre. Now in his fourth season, The Eric Andre show has been a regular on Adult Swim, showing ten minute episodes, featuring two guests and a "musical performance." It is still relatively unknown, but not as much as in the first season. There, rarely were there celebrities being interviewed, and they literally had to have people impersonate them (although the impersonation was a joke itself) with actors impersonating George Clooney, Russel Brand, Jay Z, and Beyonce. It was only into the second season that they received bigger guests, and, through four, they have so far been able to host celebrities such as Seth Rogen, Krysten Ritter and late night host Jimmy Kimmel.

The show begins with Eric destroying the set in unique ways. Eric is often causing harm to himself and often nude, and, after the total destruction, Eric sits down in a chair while the set around him is cleaned and set up again in seconds, reminiscent of the live action Cat In The Hat. Eric's co-host, Hannibal Burress, the Andy Richter to his Conan O'Brien is introduced, and Eric does his monologue. The monologue is traditionally very anti-humor, often playing off the love of his The Big Bang Theory laugh track audience, my personal favorite being Eric repeating the phrase "Lindsay Lohan is in the news" to the unbeknownst laughter of his fake audience.

The main event, though, are the celebrity interviews. While the show seems almost everything like a normal talk show, as his guests talk sincerely, Eric slowly starts to make them uncomfortable. A personal favorite is when Eric said to Sharknado star Aubrey Peeples: "John Wayne once said 'I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.' Why did you re-tweet that?"

It's almost a formula; the celebrities go from normal to confused to uncomfortable. I would even call a being a celebrity on this show embarrassing, especially if you don't handle it the right way. To feel such a side of celebrities, to me, was shocking, as I would only see this side of celebrities on the covers of gossip magazines or on shows like "Access Hollywood" or "Extra", that cliche where celebrities would be hounded by the press and would walk away, sometimes with no make-up if it was a female, with an impatient face. Funny enough, Eric actually satirized that aspect with a segment where he and a news crew would walk up to random people in grocery store parking lots to vaguely ask them about "the allegations."

Getting back to it, though, showing these celebrities as uncomfortable is revealing a side to them that me, you, or anyone rarely sees: their vulnerability. Talk shows always throw soft questions at their guests because they need other guests to come on. Call it the Talk Show Industrial Complex. The only reason why Eric Andre keeps getting celebrities to come on is because of both the show's obscurity and the lassitude of these celebrity's agents, thinking it was just your ordinary talk show. So the talk show is just a supplement for celebrities, a way to make them look better, unbenowenst to the viewer. We see this lie, and we feed off of it, and we try to emulate it until it becomes ourselves. This show, however, is the antidote to that. We see these celebrities, and we see their shock and their confusion, things we, as ordinary people, experience every day. We see the troubles that they go through, and we realize that this is real and that changing won't help us out because the only thing changing will do is separate us from our true selves.

Sadly, the Eric Andre show is in it's own paradox. If it stays underground, not only will not many people know about it, but it get cancelled, as great shows in the past, despite their intelligence, have before. If it gets too popular, either celebrities and their agents will be smart and turn the show down, or celebrities and their agents will be in on the joke, and the show will have to pivot, which does not sound promising to me. However, this show will end sooner rather than later, especially with the success Eric and Hannibal have been receiving, respectively, but, hopefully, this show will live on and make us realize that we should be striving to be nothing more than ourselves.