"This is Eric Sevareid.
It is one of the minor tragedies of our time that the impulse to parody so often outstrips the talent required to do it well. It is not enough to pretend to be clever, nor is it enough to wield a stale vocabulary like a man swinging a broadsword at an opponent who has already left the room.
This, I regret to inform you, is where 'Lorne Michaels'—who bears no apparent relation to the producer of Saturday Night Live, and certainly no relation to Tom Lehrer—has found himself. He attempts, as many before him have, to send up the distinctive cadences of David Roche, a man whose rhetorical flourishes can, at times, invite such an effort. But to parody a style is to understand it, and it is in that understanding that our friend Lorne has fallen tragically short.
There is no rhythm to his prose. The sentences meander without music, their weight sinking heavily in the reader’s mind like a stone dropped into a still pond—only without the satisfaction of the splash. His words do not dance; they lurch. They do not build; they pile up, undisciplined and formless, collapsing under their own pretension.
And so we find ourselves, once again, where we so often do on these digital back roads of the information age: confronted not with the sharp sting of genuine satire, but with the dull, plodding weight of failed ambition.
I would be remiss if I did not say this much for David Roche: for all his mannerisms, for all his flourishes, there is an internal logic to his style. A rhythm. A voice. A sense of play. And if he is, at times, earnest to a fault, he is at least a man whose words move.
The same cannot be said of his would-be parodists.
There is a certain kind of man who believes himself clever, not because he is, but because he assumes cleverness to be the natural byproduct of condescension. He mistakes verbosity for depth, florid prose for thoughtfulness, a well-worn literary reference for wisdom. And worst of all, he believes that to tear something down—someone down—requires no greater skill than to build something up. That it is, in fact, the easier thing. He is wrong.
For CBS News, I’m Eric Sevareid."