Tag Archives: Jokes

For dummies, morons or complete idiots

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Literature for Illiterates
A friend of mine says the best guide to constitutional law among titles he’s surveyed is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the U.S. Constitution. I’d prefer the 70’s era light-hearted For Beginners incarnation as a recommendation. Not just because that series has the co-op recycled paper look compared to the cautionary yellow & black, distinctly generic (re. anti- aesthetic) packaging of the current self-hating imprimatur.

I think the trendy For Utter Morons marketing attitude is a horrible acceptance of today’s sorry anti-intellectual state of affairs. The American viewer-ship has shown itself as audience, gathering, or consumer group, to BE complete idiots. Or dummies, or worse, no question. But do we need to wear the sign? Why that indignity too?

Rush Limbaugh can talk to us like we’re idiots, make jokes which we’ll laugh at like idiots, or have us applaud unknowingly at our own duping like idiots. But I’d like to draw the line at being called an idiot for the laugh.

No, I’d rather a book “for the novice” or “an introduction to” or other healthy self-depricating sobriquet. Perhaps I am also put off by the condescension. Astrophysics in Plain Words would also disqualify.

You say the “Complete Idiot” reference is just a joke, it’s meant to be funny, to be catchy, to sell books. Being an idiot myself much of the time, I don’t find it funny at all. Neither would I find amusing, Beauty for Ugly Girls, Etiquette for Poor People, or Landlording for Assholes.

Public polls such a laugh

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Someone once related to me the definition of “polling.” It means the removal of a bull or steer’s horns. If we stick with the economists’ term of endearment for the general public, the great beast, the meaning of polling booths comes full circle. Polling is to take the sharp pointy bits from the common man’s arsenal. His power to vote.

If you want to bank on what the public will decide, this being a democracy, tell the public what to decide! More effectively, tell the public what it itself has decided. That’s an easier sell. Black equals white, no? Well 70% of the American public believes black is white. Ergo it may as well be. What “is” if not what is believed to be so?

Mainstream media’s infamous “some people say” mis-attribution not only represented what no-one indeed had said, it also implied that what some people say ought to include you, unless you want to hang with the wrong people. Polls go further. They tell us what some of US say, apparently. And not just some, but most.

When we’ve become too guarded to have spin-doctors tell us what we just heard, a focus group will tell us what we have concluded ourselves we heard. Did Saddam Hussein have anything to do with 9/11? Polls show Americans believe he did. Ergo…

What is this? Are we to believe democracy is about majority consensus concerning which is ass or hole in the ground?

Never mind that the media can choose who they poll, depending on the conclusion they want drawn. But who is the media to tell an American public what to decide about a given news development? Imagine if they tried to tell you that inedible crap tastes good. Actually I’m not impartial about that one. Imagine if they dared to tell you what was funny on television!

Laugh tracks on sitcoms break up the dead air between sometimes questionable jokes. Like professional laughers planted in a theater audience, they encourage the rest to laugh collectively, to share in the mirth at what must certainly have been funny. Since funny is subjective, and enjoyment is a matter of the spirit of the experience, it’s hard to argue that canned laughter doesn’t enhance the experience. No harm done, unless the jokes are really insensitive and mostly condescending put-downs. See the haunting Rodney Dangerfield sitcom parody sequence in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers if you want to see a laughtrack off the tracks.

We’re used to being led to laughter, being misled by shills to fall for the cardsharp’s con or the rigged auction, being fooled by phony customers who claim to be cured by snake oil salesmen or revival preachers, you’d think by now we could see through “focus groups” of dubious wits appearing to giving voice to our silenced participation, or see through polling figures pulled from thin air, actually straight from an advertiser or politician’s custom order of their wet dream for our submission.

How best to stage manage Pakistan’s regime change?

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Oh what a dilemma! How will the US, champion of world democracy, stage manage regime change for the world’s most populous Muslim country?

It seems that Busharraf is as spent out as the American dollar itself. But Benahir Bushutto is not the military man behind the curtain that the US has to turn to. That general is Leavenworth, Kansas trained, General Ashfaq Kiyani.

Bhutto is the ‘pretty face’ for the American public of American-made Pakistan regime change. In Pakistan itself, she will fail to impress.

I can already imagine the jokes that have to be arising amongst the English speaking intellectual set of Pakistan that will play on this general’s name, Ashfaq. Truth can be stranger than fiction, and it seems that God truly is Great! Ashfaq to power!

And at home in the US, the ambulance chasers are storming the Supreme Court building on behalf of Pakistani regime change! I think these US lawyers don’t quite get it that they should be demanding regime change at home instead of so far, very far away.

Float like a butterfly, sting like Al Gore

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Once-upon-a-time-Vice-president, Al Gore, now introduces himself at public appearances with a real knee-slapper: the man who won the 2000 election. The joke counts on the audience knowing about the rigged count in Florida, black box voting, Supreme court cronyism, etc, because Al Gore explains it no further. To me it’s like the Monty Python routine, nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more, know what I mean? Except the audience does know and does get it. Hahaha, say no more!

Well I don’t get it. A stolen election, a bitter aftermath, tragic consequences which compound every day, to Al Gore this is a joke?

If Al Gore, Emmy, Oscar and Nobel in hand, wants another shot at the helm, he’s got some ‘splaining to do.

Gore is being given credit for taking global warming seriously, but I’m not sure it reflects his taking responsibility for the problem. What’s he doing about it? He’s running around talking about it. Who does he think is responsible for it?!

Gore wants us to address global warming. Weren’t he and Clinton in charge once-upon-a-time? What did they do about it? The little boy who put his finger in the dike wouldn’t be so honored if the Nobel Committee had seen him laughing while the hole was being drilled.

Now Americans are looking to Al to be the Democrat’s Great White Hope, to step into the ring and trounce Bush and Co in the next election. Does Gore give you any sense that he wouldn’t do the same thing he did in 2000, graciously step aside while barbarians plunder the country, his finger on the alarm bell, a silent alarm meant not to alarm the burglars, pretending but probably knowing that really there are no first responders on the way. Gore is the ambulance driver waiting for roadside assistance, cracking jokes with the patient, both deluded that there’s another ambulance on the way, one dying, the other contemplating another run at a rescue.

Some chose their battles, holding themselves as would-be winners above the fray, had the fray mattered. Al Gore chose his battle in 2000 and it wasn’t the presidency, the fate of the world perhaps being merely academic. To the above-the-fray class I assure you it is. Now the man who would be king wants to weigh in again? Why?

My favorite sports analogy is prizefighting. They are surely the most courageous men who enter the ring knowing they bring no one but themselves to bear against the blows of their opponent. You want to be heavyweight champion of the world? No one”s going to do it for you.

Evo Morales on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show

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My wife loves this guy and his name because his name, Evo Morales, translates as… ‘Eve Morals’. A boy named Evo in Bolivia might have a life just a little like a boy named Sue in Oklahoma would! Who knows? Here he is on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show

Maybe Ahmadinejad should have done that program instead of visiting Columbia University? He could have done some jokes along the lines of….

There was an Imam, Pastor, and Rabbi who all went out to lunch together with God and here’s what they all ordered….

Jon Stewart certainly would have treated him with respect and dignity instead of trying to incite a war.

Democratic Party corruption sinks the heart of Cindy Sheehan

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Cindy Sheehan has been grieving a long time, and this Memorial Day after the capitulation of the Democratic Party legislators in Congress was particularly rough. But it is more than that. The pain is made even worse by how inactive so many rank and file Democratic Party voters are in opposing this war.

At street vigils we see this, too. So many liberal minded folk wave and honk their horns in support of our vigil, but then it seems that they never get out of their cars to be the protesters, and not just the driver by-ers. After a while, this becomes disheartening.

We hope that Cindy gets her spirits back up and rejoins the activist antiwar movement after some family time off. She deserves the best, and she has given America her best. Here is her last commentary about how despairing she now feels. Many feel the same alongside her.

We are sad to see it be so, but when push comes to shove, the Democratic Party is not to be relied on. Cindy Sheehan tried to push the Democratic Party into action, but the corporate controllers resisted. She is not the first, and will not be the last to fail in such a project.

Good Riddance Attention Whore
by Cindy Sheehan

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

article continues

Cultivating the clown inside him

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‘Ha-Ha-Ha! With your help we fooled them all, all the while playing the clown.’

That was the message Bush delivered to the corporate press insider crowd yesterday. In effect, he was thanking them for helping build up his lovable fool image to a level that Ronald McDonald Reagan never even came close to aspiring to. It was Dubya playing his Hogan Heroes’ role of Coronel Klink. Karl Rove played himself as Sargeant Sholtz.

Our corporate military-industrial dictatorship laughs at us, boasting that they have such an ignorant peasantry following them all the way, that it is we, the average American, that is the joke as far as they are concerned.

See… Bush serves up the jokes at meal

I don’t understand all this talk about impeachment?

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I don’t understand why liberals obsess about impeaching Bush? Just the word ‘impeach’ is something that has strong negative connotations like with the phrase, ‘they tried to impeach his credibility.’ In fact, isn’t that what the Republicans and Kenneth Starr did exactly when they tried to impeach Clinton? They tried to impeach Slick Willy’s credibility, besmirch it. Fancy that from such scoundrels as the Republicans? Besmirching someone’s character rather than honestly challenging their politics is certainly what they do best.

Let’s look at what’s wrong with the impeachment process. When Nixon was impeached, he was removed from the office of the Presidency, and then promptly pardoned for his actual crime of committing burglary! Wouldn’t due process be to actually have given him a criminal trial, convict him of what he did, and only then, remove him from office?

Imagine if other criminals were treated as Nixon was? Imagine if somebody burglarized your house and stole and otherwise trashed all your precious possessions inside. The police get the guy, but the District Attorney and the men in blue, before a criminal trial of any sort, have the guy fired from his job (assuming he has one other than fencing and burglary?). Then, the District Attorney informs you that this criminal who ransacked your castle has been given a pardon, and that there will never be any trial regarding his criminal act! Then the criminal burglar goes and opens up a big library (something presidential) with his name on it, and retires in bliss. While you, the victim, sit in wonder at the whole damn charade of process!

America, supposedly has one set of laws for all. We all know by now that is a total crock of shit, but still? Shouldn’t the public demand enforcement of laws on the books, even when the president, the vice-president, and his high officials break them? Torture, assassination, and robbery are a few of the crimes committed by Bush and his Klan. Shouldn’t we demand that they be criminally prosecuted rather than just timidly asking that Bush be quietly removed from office?

The most popular sign I ever use protesting against the illegal invasion of Iraq and looting of that country states, JAIL BUSH, FREE IRAQ. Can you get any simpler than that?

Does anybody really think that criminals are really afraid of ‘impeachment’? They make jokes about it down in Florence no doubt. ‘Hey, Guards, let me go. Impeach me instead.’ Why such a blatantly double standard of legal process when it comes to high officials?

Impeachment works this way. You first try to smear the character of a person you can’t get to totally go along with your corruption. The impeachment of the character, Slick, began way before the proceedings in the House and Senate. ‘His wife is a lesbian, you know? Slick sells used cars, etc, etc.’ And then came that magic moment! ‘Slick gets blow jobs! Under the table when his lesbian wife is out shopping.’ That’s what an impeachment proceeding is all about.

Any crimes no longer matter. Was it that Dick burglarized the Democratic Party HQ and slaughtered a few million or so? Or was it that he used foul language on tapes that allowed the character of this criminal to be impeached, even as his crimes went none prosecuted? Slick almost fell for ‘lying’ and getting a blow job without permission form the Senate and House, not for his invasion of Yugoslavia. Why are liberals trying to use such a travesty of character assassination against Dubya? Revenge? Because the guy sure has plenty criminal abuses against the People that he needs ot be prosecuted for instead. Impeachment is a shameful avoidance of what really should be done.

Let’s begin to demand that Bush, Cheney, Alberto Gonzalez, Rumsfield, and Rice be investigated for their criminal acts, and convicted of them. Just one example. Authorizing kidnappings and ‘renditions’ is a criminal act. If you are I were to grab somebody off the street, carry him to a basement, and then torture him as the Bush Klan have done with people, we would maybe even get the death penalty. Saddam Hussein certainly did. Shouldn’t we being asking at least for life imprisonment for our own officials that commit these exact same crimes. Aw heck, I’m even going to ask that Rumsfield be hanged by his neck, after the due process of convicting this mass murderer and master thief for his thousand and one crimes.

Asking for impeachment to be applied, and only alone to Bush, is a totally wimpy thing. A cheap revenge for those the liberal community oppose. Why not ask for the full extent of the law to be applied? Last, I am going to link with a speech that George Galloway just gave in Great Britain, and this great statesman does not call for impeachment of Tony Blair, British arch criminal. He calls for prosecution instead. That’s what we need to be doing here in America, too, when our corporate government creeps (pardon me, Tricky Dick) break the law. It’s due process.

George Galloway speech

Nuke Dublin and other stories

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Ok so not many other stories in this.

But you know how you can go into certain stores, you know the ones, that have posters and bumper stickers and tee shirts with the Tricolor in the international NO sign, the red circle with the diagonal slash?

And short snappy slogans like Nuke Paris or Boycott France or whatever the hell else the Freedom Fries commando would gladly wear or display.

You hear stupid jokes about how the French are worthless as soldiers, the one about “have you heard the joke about the french army? Well the french army IS the joke!!” and every redneck in earshot busts a gut laughing at how very clever that is.

And you think, to yourself, Self, if the French army really were worthless, why are these buffoons so angry that they didn’t throw their worthless soldiers’ lives away the way GW throws away American and British lives?

So I came up with a new thought for Tee Shirts, and Bumper Stickers, a non-slogan to monkey wrench the slogan driven world gone mad.

Boycott Ireland, ask me why or Nuke Dublin (ask me why)

When somebody asks what that means, tell him that the Irish Republic had also refused to back The Chimp’s war play. Along with other Commonwealth nations like Canada.
It seems to me, personally, that all the invective thrown against the French, is done by cowards.

Simple math tells these cowards that though Ireland had also flat out given the Bushmaster the bird on Iraq, in America there are one fuck of a lot more Irish descendants than French. So they play the Frog-baiting game because they feel that the French descendants probably aren’t nearly as likely to kick their damn teeth down their throats.

Of course, that wouldn’t play very well in Louisiana, because most of the non-French whites there are Irish, so who would they target there?

A puppeteer

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puppeteerI wanted to study dance in college. I wanted to perform on Broadway. I wanted to walk through campus, and life, with “jazz hands.”
 
As a freshman, I was at CU-Boulder, living the life of a lab rat as a Molecular/Cellular/Developmental Biology major. My older brother was a year ahead of me, also an MCDB major, brilliant beyond belief. He seemed to understand the “cell,” with all of its asinine complexity, at an intuitive level. He understood physics, chemistry, had memorized the Periodic Table and was even capable of making hilarious jokes about it. I, meanwhile, stumbled around campus humiliated by the forehead crease left by my lab goggles wondering what geek could help me figure out the molarity of my latest unknown.

I eventually changed my major to business, accounting more specifically. It wasn’t so much that I was wildly excited by debits and credits, I’m still not, or that most of the gorgeous fraternity boys were in the B School (they generally studied “finance,” accent always on the second syllable, and went on to be successful brokers or developers), but that I didn’t come from a particularly wealthy family and I needed a career, not just an education. Becoming a CPA seemed a safe bet. It has proven to be such.

Because of my college experience, and maybe my perceived lack of personal creative freedom, I always find it interesting to hear what young people are studying these days. I wonder how the parents feel, especially the fathers, when they hear that their young son is going to be, say, a puppeteer. Does this revelation cause Dad to puff out his chest and smoke a stogie on the back deck? Does Mom call over her coffee klatch girlfriends to boast about her son’s incredible prowess with a hand puppet?

When my son (now 21) was little he had a puppet as his constant companion. We got it at Poor Richard’s Toy Store and it was, sad to say, a beaver. Furry brown with lewd teeth and a hopeful demeanor. Bren wanted to take it everywhere. Unfortunately, after about five minutes, he wanted me to hold it. He was a very engaging child and, frequently, when he saw someone he found interesting he would shout, in a loud Mickey Mouse voice, “Look at my mom’s beaver!” This, of course, had an EFHutton effect. Everything would slow to a crawl, people would turn their heads deliberately toward me to see how I would respond.

I learned quickly to deal with this recurrent nightmare. I “worked up” a little beaver dance and performed it on the person nearest to me that appeared somewhat sympathetic. I would take “Beav” and bite the person’s forearm and say “Come help me build my dam!”

I don’t want to malign puppeteers. In fact, I want to laud puppeteers. In my immediate family, we have three CPAs, a pathologist, an attorney, a pharmaceutical drug rep. Our parents are proud of us. We all have careers and children, big houses and big mortgages, lots of demands for our money and our time. We’re living the American dream!

I can’t help but wonder, though, if any of my siblings ever feel like I do while I’m scurrying through the office clutching my mechanical pencil and my laptop, wearing the latest Ann Taylor fashions, picturing myself instead in fishnet hose and a bustier, standing under the bright theater lights, bowing demurely to thunderous applause. When my older brother holds his stethoscope does he secretly wish it were a paintbrush? When my sister makes her closing arguments in front of the judge and jury, would she rather be doing improvisational comedy in a little club somewhere? I don’t have any idea.

I know one thing. I hope my children will pursue their passions. It may be an uphill battle. Already their Dad and I have college funds set up for each of them. We have firm ideas about which elite schools they should attend and what careers might hold promise. I imagine we’ll have a doctor or two, maybe a physicist, probably a computer whiz. The IQ tests have been administered and we know where their strengths lie. But not where their dreams lie.

I have secret wish. I want a puppeteer.

Oh, Lord, not Kumbaya!

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Campfire songsMy muse is upset because everyone is making fun of Kumbaya.
 
Relax, Kumbaya is safe. The story you read in the Gazette, Oh Lord, not Kumbaya, syndicated from the Dallas Morning Herald, is a rather underhanded loaded question. You know the classic example: “When did you stop beating your wife?” Whether you never stopped or never started, the load is delivered, you do. (But you don’t.)

The DMH article asked “How did Kumbaya become such a joke?” and then lists instances of the joke being made: A GOP ad, a Christian Science Monitor quip. They are able to find an early instance in an obscure 80’s comedy Volunteers spoofing the Peace Corps. It seems to me SNL has made fun of everything, that wouldn’t make the ridicule universal.

I was tipped off when my friend paraphrased the article as having said Kumbaya was an “international joke.” What international? The rest of the world isn’t making fun of our spirituals, certainly not our peaceniks. The lambast is purely English-speaking and it’s coming from corporate mouthpieces who want to ridicule any tools of grassroots community efforts.

Television has no interest in sing-a-long songs. People singing together and not looking at the TV doesn’t serve them at all. But for people communing together, a melody and lyric like Kumbaya is very powerful, especially because everybody knows it already. When protestors assembled with Cindy Sheehan last year in Crawford, we sang Kumbaya among others. We wound up singing all the patriotic songs too because they were the only ones we all knew.

And so the media is determined to keep the heat on hippies and idealists, religious or not, by making fun of them, and concluding that the derision is universal. The press laughs with each other’s jokes and then report the humor to be statistically unanimous.

The Dallas reporter asked several etymologists “why did Kumbaya become an idiom for idiocy?” And none of the etymologists knew. Maybe that’s a tip off it isn’t.

Hopefully one day the press will stop trying to paint people who hope for peace and goodwill to all mankind as idiots.

Kill Bush

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Kill Bush! Kill, kill, kill. Let’s do it, Julia. In case people don’t know by now, Julia is a 14 year old school girl in California who had posted a photo of Bush with the words ‘Kill Bush’ onto her My Place website. Despite the fact that months went by and Bush had visited her city twice during that time unprotected from Julia, all of a sudden the Secret Service came by. Two big beefy ones, too. Julia had posted this material when she was 13 years old, so their visit was not exactly that of a speedy response team. And it seems that despite the Zillions already spent on Homeland Security bureaucracy, that nationally we still got basically what New Orleans has… which is A Confederacy of Dunces on the security job. So just who called the cops?

Well, we personally don’t know the answer on that one. No doubt, some self righteous super zealot of the Right, since they are all crawling out of the woodwork these days. We got the self-hating red diaper baby, David Horowitz, outing liberal professors all around the country. We got the racist Anglo ‘Minutemen’ calling up cops with info about people not speaking America’s official language, English without acent…. as they compare themselves to Neighborhood Watch, chuckle as you will. And Barnes and Noble has stacks of the excremental works of Bill O’Reilly as you go in. He’s watching you, American liberals! And we got lynch mobs here in Colorado trying to hang Ward Churchill from a pole. If they can’t do that, they’ll probably send him a blanket with small pox on it. And we got the airport security branch of the US military waging war everywhere on our behalf at the airports. Of course, they do do a little collateral damage from time to time. But heck, if you don’t like the gated community called America, then get out, ay?

Just 4 months ago, my high school buddy who I had lost contact with for years and I, reestablished a correspondence. But it got torpedoed for me when he got on the case against a University of Texas prof, an international specialist in lizards, no less! My friend was aghast that this evilutionist expert, Professor Eric Pianka, had just said in a university talk that bacteria deserved to live, whereas mankind really didn’t, since our species was working night and day to destroy the planet. Good Lord, what a crime!

MY high school buddy had heard about it on the Drudge Report. And they had heard about it from some Southern Baptist scientists (yes, unbelievable, isn’t it?) who had called the government alleging that Pianka was advocating biological warfare! And they had called all their Intelligent Design friends, and Drudge, too. So, Homerland Security again went to work. You see, they take our security quite seriously, so they marched out to the Univ of Texas to check out this liberal terrorist. And they examined, under a microscope, all his words of wisdom ever uttered about evolution and lizards. Clear it was, that this non-Creationist had a greater love for lizards and bacteria than he did for humankind. Yet he had not started a biological warfare lab at the U.

Well, in short, both Professor Eric Pianka and Julia remain free. After all, America doesn’t burn witches yet. But Homeland Security does take reports from an alert citizenry, and that’s a citizenry full of finks, evidently. And they do take seriously any jokes at the airport about bombs. We may even begin to see signs saying that ‘This School is a Gun Free School’ posted at our kindergardens. So, Liberals, please join me in my effort to give these nice folk all something to think about.

Kill Bush. Shotgun pellet Donald Rumsfield. Deny Habeus Corpus to Alberto Gonzales. Put Condaleeza in bondage… no… I mean a ‘stress position’. Nuke Washington DC! Go after them in their bunkers, and blow the whole crew to smithereens! Please, do it now.

Liberals, start advocating violence (including the violent overthrow of America’s government) everywhere. If you can’t beat them, then join them. Oops, you do that already by voting for the Democratic Party. So try advocating violence instead. Let it out of your Gandhian souls. Kill, Kill, Kill!

Kill Bush.

Stephen Colbert and the missing laugh track

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Hail the Court JesterStephen Colbert bombed. We know this because there was no laugh track.
 
I watched Colbert’s verbal pie-throwing at the Washington Correspondents Association Dinner. The press corps though it wasn’t funny big time.

First off, how do you make fun of this administration and what it’s done? War crimes, torture, theft, breaking the law, it’s not readily very funny. The emperor has no clothes. His bare willy might be funny if it wasn’t pushed deep into a writhing bloody world.

Stephen Colbert did the best he could and what was most unfunny about his effort was the reaction of his audience. They didn’t like what he said at all. The emperor doesn’t know he has no clothes, he’s oblivious. But his courtiers know better, they can see it. If they’re opting to say nothing, they certainly don’t welcome a Colbert coming in and making light of their eyesight or their motives.

At the dinner, Bush played up the adversarial relationship he has with the press. Stephen Colbert played along with this so-called rivalry when he explained why he should have been considered for the position of press secretary. Pointing to the audience Colbert told the president that he had “nothing but contempt for these guys.”

Which turned out to be likely, didn’t it? Stephen Colbert proved that the press were nothing but yes-men courtiers, conspirators and collaborators who couldn’t laugh.

Colbert’s press club jokes were funny. It’s just that the laugh track was missing. His jokes hit home, even if, as we’ve always suspected, no-one was home.

Hee Haw rides again

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Hee Haw rides again!
Reprise: Junior Samples, Grandpa Jones, Buck Owens and Roy Clark.
 
No I’m messing with you. This is the cast of Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again or something like that. Three funny guys who make an enormous living by speaking for the common man, plus the Cable Guy, their greek chorus, in this case impersonating the common lower common man. Really, when Larry The Cable Guy, Bill Engvall, Jeff Foxworthy and Ron White appear in promotional pictures, CD covers or movie posters, they are never shown in any other order than where their fans have seen them sit on their Comedy Central special. What an interesting opinion of the intellectual incapacity of your target audience.

I caught a little of this popular act on TV and I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. HEE HAW! It was funny then, and it’s funny still. But back then we didn’t have hicks for country music stars and for race car drivers and for president of the United States. Is this where you get when you idolize people who behave like they were schooled in a barn?

We make multi-millionaires out of people who talk like hayseeds. Nothin’ wrong with hayseeds, on tractors naturally. And clearly country music stars, like redneck comedy stars and like NASCAR driving stars have a lot more going for them upstairs than your average service station gofer. Most of the time we can tell that politicians and preachers who pander to the lowest common denominator, are not themselves so gullible. However, we don’t want our doctors to be hayseeds, nor our scientists, nor our news reporters, nor even customer service representatives. Why are we looking for comedic wisdom from hayseeds?

Lauding a hayseed for comedic wit seems to me to set a terrible example. We’re supposed to laugh at what stupid thinks is stupid? It’s terrifying to me that there’s even an entire auditorium full of stupids who want to hear country dumbkins opine about life. This is misogeny and gay-bashing and oversimplification of everything. Sure it’s funny to laugh at political correctness, until you consider why something is thought correct or incorrect in the first place. Life is a little bit complicated, and we don’t mind admitting that we like the most qualified person to be driving the bus. What is so funny about an idiot sounding off? Especially in a world where the court jester resembles the radio commentator and worse our presidential dauphin.

These guys tell the same jokes to each other, even work in ad libs for each other from their own original routines. This would not be so bad except that the good ol’ boys give each other kudos for their clever repartees, even though the audience would know from the CD they’ve already memorized that even the joviality is canned.

Most of us, when retelling a story in the presence of someone who we might have told already, will begin by saying “I was telling such-an-such…” so awkward are we about repeating ourselves. Performers naturally have to repeat themselves, and have to act among each other like the material is fresh. But to give each other credit for extemporizing a put-down is pretty damn lower denominator.

King’s missing dong, episode 1

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Time Magazine characterizes King Kong’s enthousiasmOkay, I admit that’s my own headline. There was indeed no trace of a King dong, but neither was there lust, nor anything more than a communication barrier overcome by physical clowning. A young white lass with Vaudeville chops was able to cajole the mighty Kong where scores of unfortunate black maidens had failed.
 
But really the special effects in the latest King Kong were amazing.

With special effects the filmmakers were able to create a giant gorilla who went ape at the sound of tom-toms summoning him to dine on a mouse-sized snack.

Special effects recreated superstitious black peoples who subsisted on the craggy coast of Skull Island, separating themselves from the island’s vegetation to live behind great fortifications and beneath countless pointy sticks on which were impaled human sacrificees.

Special effects produced dinosaurs also very keen to fight over what would be a tiny human morsel, willing to discard bigger kill for the smaller bird in the bush, even gnash away at a rocky surface trying to snatch said bony morsel.

To another extreme, special effects created bats which prey on animals larger than insects, and they stalk their target, hanging upside down each time a bit closer.

Convenient for the slow shutter rate of film projectors, these bats fly with the awkwardness of pterodactyls, the beating of their wings visible to human eyes. Lucky for our heroes who escape by holding on to the wing of a bat, while he flies with the other. A feat clearly accomplished only through special effects.

Special effects depict a world plainly ignorant of what some know as the food chain. The filmmakers can adhere to the laws of gravity, sort of, and whichever laws of physics can be illustrated, but they can’t grasp the food chain or that animals kill to eat, they do not maraud mercilessly.

By depicting nature as malevolent, we are expressing the highest disrespect for what really have become our wards. Like depicting Jesus with a machine gun for example. It might be funny, but it would be pretty undeserved.

But there’s more. Special effects produced stampedes both human and Jurassic, from which few casualties are seen. Men are able to keep pace beneath Brontosaurus legs to make the Spaniards who run with the bulls every year in Pamplona look like wusses.

And in the end you have Kong flinging blond lasses left and right, you have an entire opera house audience stampede to the exits with nary a body left behind.

In fact, given Peter Jackson’s fondness for gross-out scenes like the close-up of the carnivorous worm devouring a man head first, it seems strange that they cranked back the special effects for Kong’s final splat unto street level from the Empire State building. Kong’s body at rest on the street is shown not one bit like a sack empty of its potatoes, the usual sudden end to a 100 story fall.

David Letterman fans might have hoped to see Kong burst like a watermelon fallen from a great height, but special effects intervened.

And so the special effects try to approximate mechanical consequences, but ignore the organic, what used to be the common knowledge of life.

While this might suit the lower educated of today’s movie audience, Peter Jackson certainly does not limit himself to that denominator. In an early scene he risks boring that crowd with three interminable inside jokes: the actress they had wanted to cast for this adventure, “Fay,” was already doing an “RKO” picture for that damned “Cooper.” Rocky Horror Picture Show fans would get those references, but so what? Why not throw some bones to zoology majors and enlighten everyone.

The special effects in King Kong trade not merely in the currency of the implausible or improbable or impossible, they perpetuate the currency of ignorance with which people do great evil to nature and the environment and other cultures, particularly indigenous ones.

This film plays with lots of movie land conventions, but to an audience that is less privy to the inside references and more prone to base human reactions to the demonized stereotypes.