I don’t care if I live to be 40, I will never write a headline that perfect ever again.
You know, I have no idea why a newspaper would ever run Ziggy, because it is simply not funny. At all. Ever. OK, if Ziggy got a injured in a blender or if he had to be taken to the Emergency Room with a foreign object lodged in his colon, that would be funny.
And we all know that Ziggy spanks it, right?
Anyway, I have often wondered why conservative humor is just so stunningly unfunny. You know how some people are tone deaf? I think that whatever birth defect that leads to conservatism removes the capacity to hear humor. What pass for “jocular” conversations between like-minded conservatives often sound like, well, the case for the prosecution at Nuremberg. Take, for instance, the well publicized and as of yet inexplicable interchange between Bill O’Reilly and former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow:
O’REILLY: Now what is the career plan here? You’re a fat cat now, ex-White House spokesperson. You can make a lot of money bloviating like I do, give the speeches — I mean, you know, you can write a book. I assume you can do that, right?
SNOW: Yes.
O’REILLY: But you’re not going to tell all in the book?
SNOW: No, as a matter of fact, I’m going to – I’m interested in two books. I’m going to do a lot of speeches, but also, I’m going to do a book about how you deal with something like cancer. You know.
O’REILLY: A new cancer book.
SNOW: Yes, well, it’s going to be with cancer and also how you deal with the unexpected, because it’s a lot broader.
O’REILLY: You know what you can do with all the respect? You can combine how-I-deal-with cancer with how-I-deal-with- the-White House press corps. Because they’re both insidious, invasive. They both have to be wiped out. And you know, you see the theme that I’m getting at here?
SNOW: Well, maybe I could thread it into…O’REILLY: You know, you put little microbes and David Gregory’s face on the cover. You know, it’s huge. This is a high concept deal I’m giving you, man.
SNOW: Oh, man. I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you have that one.
If I were Snow, I would have smacked Bill at “A new cancer book.”
Or you could look at the following glittering gem of hate written by that Noxema-smeared corpse Ann Coulter:
I’ve had dozens of cabs refuse to stop for me on Fifth Avenue. Sometimes they forget to turn on the “off duty” light, or they’re daydreaming or maybe they’ve read my columns on Muslims.
Could she be worse? I hate to ask the question, because she’ll take me up on it.
Ann thinks she’s funny, Bill thinks he’s Jesus or Disco Stu or someone (David Brent from the original Office comes to mind), but by far the most incontinent and incompetent conservative humorist is Bruce Tinsley. What he publishes, the comic strip “Mallard Fillmore,” barely qualifies as thought, much less as humor. Yet, newspapers like my local daily, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch feel to compelled to keep him on as a sort of ideological foil to Doonsbury. Inhale deeply, friends:
According to the prestigious Interwebs, after Tinsley created this thoughtless and irritating Opus knock-off, he was fired from his job as an illustrator at the Virginia Progress. I’m going to say that it was not because he was conservative so much as he was the least funny person on the planet since Jay Leno.
Of course, the riotous Daily Show has scooped me on Mallard Fillmore in America: The Book:
Now that goes down smooth and finishes clean, people.
Now I was wondering why conservatives are just so unfunny, and I am at a loss. The mirthless religious and social conservatives had humor bred out of them generations ago, but their preferred reading material might be defined by its lack of irony. There is no “Book of Jokes” in the Bible, unless you count Job. (“Two Samaritans walk into a bar, and they are stoned to death because drinking lets the demons in.”) God probably thought that turning Lot’s Wife into a pillar of salt was pretty clever, but it comes across as just as unnecessary as Bill’s hilarious cancer humor.
Grumble grumble.
HJ
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