During a recent interview, Hillary was chatting with some liberal chick who said something about how Cory Booker said “if they go low, we kick them”. Hillary corrected her by pointing out that it was Eric Holder who said that. Hillary then slipped in the line “I know, they all look alike” causing the audience to both gasp in shock and laugh uproariously.

Some conservatives are all “can you imagine what liberals would say if Trump said that?“, but I don’t care about that.

I think Hillary’s line, its delivery, and its timing, were comedically beautiful.

Consider the setup: her interviewer had just confused Cory Booker and Eric Holder. Two black guys who look NOTHING alike. Instead of Hillary looking at her like she was an idiot for making such a stupid mistake and saying “How could you confuse those two? They look NOTHING alike! You’re an idiot!”, she accomplished the same thing indirectly (and less cruelly) by referencing a stereotype everyone in her audience was familiar with.

Which is pretty much the definition of a well-timed, unexpected, funny line.

Now, I don’t like Hillary Clinton one bit, but I also know how hard it is to come up with a good line on the spot. I think this qualifies.

I still hate her for everything else she’s ever done. Not this, though.

Nate of When in the Course of Human Events [High Praise!] sent me a link to a new Facebook page:

The Legend of Joe Biden

Nate said “I think that will be getting very funny, very quickly.”

I hope Nate’s right, but I’m not holding out much hope for it.

Joe Biden is famous for being a bumbling idiot with an IQ of 30 who stands athwart history yelling “oo! shiny!”

The joke on the “Legend of Joe Biden” page is that he accomplishes legendary feats of prowess like a modern day Paul Bunyan:

Did you know Joe Biden once caught a fish, let it go, and a year to the day, that fish came back to him?

Did you know Joe Biden was in a knife fight for seventeen hours?

Did you know Joe Biden sold his soul for one penny, but that penny bought the Golden Gate Bridge?

It’s the wrong angle to use.

He’s not Daniel Boone, he’s Forrest Gump.

If Joe were on the Enola Gay, the pilot would say “Wow! Look at that mushroom cloud!”, and Joe would respond “And there’s one over there that looks like doggie!”

With Schrödinger’s Cat, you don’t know if it’s dead or alive until you look in the box. With Biden’s cat, you know it’s dead, because Joe’s off in the corner drawing on the wall with crayons, and he forgot to put air holes in the box’s lid.

Anyway, I hope “The Legend of Joe Biden” does a quick course-correction and heads down the right comedic path.

Personally, though, I think they’ll end up Biden’s Cat.

[High Praise! to Hatless in Hattiesburg]

As someone who spends WAY too much time thinking about how to be funny (as opposed to actually BEING funny) I found these hilarious:
_______________

“Three people of different nationalities walk into a bar. Two of them say something smart, and the third one makes a mockery of his fellow countrymen by acting stupid.”

—

“Three blokes walk into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability.”

—

Q: “How many members of a certain demographic group does it take to perform a specified task?”

A: “A finite number: one to perform the task and the remainder to act in a manner stereotypical of the group in question.”

—

There once was an X from place B,
Who satisfied predicate P,
The X did thing A,
In a specified way,
Resulting in circumstance C.

—

Q: How many geeks does it take to ruin a joke?

A: You mean nerd, not geek. And not joke, but riddle. Proceed.
_______________

I suppose I could add

Q: Why did the person of specified characteristic perform a common task incorrectly?

A: Because they’re stupid.

I’m on John Kerry’s e-mail list for some reason, and I got an e-mail from him titled this yesterday:

“The R in Rand Stands for Radical”

And I was dumbstruck. I don’t get how a grown man would write that thinking it’s clever. It’s like what Data would come up with if you tasked him to make a clever statement belittling someone. It’s an imitation of being clever while completely missing the concept.

Basically, the statement is a failed attempt to say “Rand and Radical Both Start with an R” in a clever way, which wasn’t really a worthwhile observation to begin with. Now, if Rand Paul’s name were “Bob R. Paul” and Kerry said, “The R in Bob R. Paul Stand for Radical”, that would be clever… for a four year old. As it is, Kerry just completely missed the clever boat. Let me point out the obvious: The R doesn’t stand for anything because Rand’s name is not an acronym. It’s just the first letter of his name. Kerry’s statement makes only slightly more sense than “The N in Rand Stands for Not Someone You Should Elect”… except that is so overly awkward and wooden that it’s actually a little funny (much like John Kerry himself).

During 2004, John Kerry demonstrated he had trouble with relating with normal human beings, and he really shouldn’t try. His e-mail would have been just fine titled “Rand is a Radical”, but instead he attempted and failed at something humorous. And humor is about making an intellectual connection with your audience saying, “I think like you.” But if from Kerry’s humor you recognize he thinks like a moron, then his message is “You’re a drooling idiot like me and would think this is clever.” So his humor is actually insulting. And thus who would want to read his stupid e-mail after that?

This isn’t just my opinion. This is the opinion of a political humor expert… who is me. And some politician really shouldn’t play with humor without an expert watching.

TEEEEJ was kind enough to send me this lolterizt! pic:

Not bad, but it could be better.

So, instead of just throwing it in with the rest of the collection next week, I’m gonna use it as a teachable moment on the importance of brevity in captioning, and show you how to make the same joke in three words:

Now, the risk I take in the shorter version is that readers won’t know what a PDA is, or that they’ll think about the other PDA. But that’s what reference links are for.

Feel free to debate the relative merits of both approaches in the comments.

I hate Obama and everything he stands for. I also hate him on a personal level, because given the choice between capitalism and socialism, he deliberately chose to support socialism. I mock him every chance I get, even for small, petty things which aren’t his fault, like his ears (although those are actually LARGE, petty things) and his mule-faced wife (some guys just like ugly chicks – whattya gonna do about it?).

But I refuse to get all Kwazy Kos Kid and make fun of him for screwing up when he didn’t actually screw up. Humor requires truth to be funny, and if it ain’t true, it ain’t funny.

Some folks are busting Obama’s chops for saying “Welcome to Cinco de Cuatro” during a Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White House, saying that it was a “gaffe”, and a “fumbled joke”. They’re wrong. It was a good joke, done deliberately, and – based on the warm, sincere audience laughter – done well.

First, Obama’s not the first person to make this joke. About 6 years ago, something very similar was used in an episode of The Simpsons, where Homer lists some upcoming local holidays:

There’s the Tongue Kiss Festival, Cinco de Ocho, the Hobo Oscars. Days just made for lovers.

This joke works because when you hear “Cinco de”, your brain automatically says “Mayo” to itself, but you get surprised by the word “Ocho”, yet it sort of fits because it rhymes with “Mayo”, and it’s a Spanish word. The joke wouldn’t work if you said “Cinco de Brick”, for example.

Obama’s joke works even better because – in addition to these factors – it also makes reference to the elephant-in-the-room awkward fact that they were celebrating a holiday named for specific day of the year on a different day. That’s a lot of work for a single word, and as a person who spends WAY too much time thinking about the mechanics of humor-writing, I can tell you that that sort of confluence of factors doesn’t happen nearly often enough.

Obama also had good delivery because he looked at his watch afterwards with a mock-confused look on his face, as though he were checking the date, to emphasize the situation.

Now, I’m not saying that that joke should have necessarily been funny to YOU, or that making one good joke makes Obama NOT an evil, power-hungry desecrator of the Constitution. I’m just saying that this particular incident doesn’t belong on his ever-growing list of screw-ups.

Having watched the video of Obama’s “Special Olympics” comment

I’ll say this:

He was making fun of himself, and since his ineptitude at bowling is legendary, I’d say he was perfectly justified in making the remark. It was a choice bit of hyperbole.

Was it funny? Not especially, but not every joke’s a winner. Some are there just to keep the mood jovial & light-hearted. I think this did that.

The IMPORTANT question is: did the audience think it was funny?

No – because no one heard him say it.

The audience was too busy laughing at Leno saying “No, that’s very good. Yes. That’s very good, Mr. President.” and making an exaggerated ‘I’m trying not to laugh out loud’ gesture of covering his mouth with his hand.

In my semi-professional opinion as a self-described humorist, I’m giving Obama a pass on this one.

The question is, will his perpetually-offended grievence-constituency base do the same?

Shockingly, 21% of HuffPo’s Kool-Aid-drinking, Obamessiah-worshiping readership say “no”.

While I’ll always consider these people idiots, at least on this one occasion, I won’t be calling them hypocrites.

Some folks are up in arms about a picture of the Whitehouse with watermelons growing in the yard and the caption “No Easter egg hunt this year”.

Being familiar with the mechanics of humor, I know you need two things for something to be funny: truth and exaggeration. But as Frank once pointed out, if you don’t have truth, a popularly accepted stereotype – true or not – will generally work just as well.

Ok, so there’s a stereotype that black people like watermelon, and since the President is black, he’d plant watermelons on the White House lawn. Ha ha ha.

Oddly enough, the California mayor who sent this to a black business woman said that he was unaware of this stereotype, so I’m not sure why he thought this was even a tiny bit funny.

The big problem, though, is that the stereotype this mocks isn’t a character flaw. Lots of people like watermelon. *I* like watermelon. Plus the fact that blackness is such a superficial aspect of Obama. It’s like mocking his ridiculous, sticky-out chimp-ears. It’s too easy of a target. It’s not even remotely clever.

However, the picture itself has a delightful visual incongruity about it, watermelons have other characteristics besides being stereotypically liked by blacks, and Obama has characteristics other than skin color. So let’s try a different caption:

Obama’s Victory Garden.

Still got the racial stereotype, but at least it drags in a political angle by referencing the obsessive comparisons of Obama to FDR.

Green on the outside, Red on the inside.

Obama is a “watermelon” – using his environmentalism to cover his communism. No racial stereotypes involved at all. Purely political.

Thanks to America’s failed public school system, the White House was forced to lower the standards for the Easter Egg Hunt.

Here it’s just carping on public policy, and those are just giant eggs lined up in rows. Only Al Sharpton would imply racism now!

So don’t be mad at Grose for being a racist, be mad at him for forwarding a sad, weak-ass joke that he didn’t even get.

Enough with the lecture, let’s just have fun with it.

* OBAMA’S GROWING POD PEOPLE!

* From the book “101 Jokes That Colorblind People Won’t Get”

* Obama’s response to Barney Frank’s complaint that his administration “didn’t have enough fruits”.

* White House receives Alternative Energy grant for “harnessing the power of the sun”.

* “Alien: Resurrection” Director’s Cut DVD includes this shocking alternate ending.

* Because fried chicken doesn’t have seeds. [Yeah, I know, but it’s still better than the original]

* Meanwhile, behind the White House, the Incredible Hulk’s litter box training showed great promise.

* Yet another protest demanding increased taxes and regulation to stop global warming.

* Obama vows to never again buy ‘marijuana’ seeds off the internet.

* The real reason Obama won’t sign a bill to stop illegal immigration.

Caption along in the comments if you’d like.

In the comments to a post on the Hollywood writers’ strike at Twenty Sided, RustyBadger asks the ultimate question:

“The people that write for The DailyShow are funny, yes, but they have an easy job: write funny stuff about famous people who are in the media spotlight so the viewers can feel smugly superior about their own pathetic lives. I mean, really. How hard IS it to make fun of Brittney Spears and Michael Jackson?”

As someone who makes fun of John Edwards EVERY SINGLE DAY, I feel emminently qualified to answer that one.

“Hardness”, as we all know, is measured on the Mohs scale, with Talc (the crumbly, powdery stone from which talcum powder is derived) being a 1 on that scale. Diamonds are a 10.

Mocking celebrities does not contain an absolute hardness factor, but is rather a repetitive-dependent sliding equation which is directly proportional to the number of times you have previously mocked the celebrity. By which I mean, the more often you make fun of someone, the harder it gets.

This SEEMS counterintuitive, as one would expect it to get EASIER with repetition – practice making perfect, and all that. However, the hardness in this case actually arises from the physical limitations of existing in a finite universe. That is, poking fun at the famous is based on making an analogy between the famous person and an existing object, and connecting the two in a manner that is completely unexpected, yet also perfectly sensible to the reader afterwards. Given that the universe contains only 10⁸⁵ discrete objects, the writer has fewer and fewer objects to compare their celebrity target to with each joke written, thus making the job increasingly hard.

As anyone who’s contributed a Bonus Fact can attest, the first one is talc-easy, but pretty soon you find yourself smacking your forehead against Hydrated Sodium Beryllium Aluminum Silicate Hydroxide Fluoride.

In other words… “very”.

So as someone who makes a living writing (if you define “living” as “three squares a day – of Ramen Noodles”), I’m siding with the writers, and showing my solidarity by posting a video that explains the writers’ strike in terms everyone can understand.

Enjoy:

[YouTube]

Know who wanted to nuke the moon? Hitler!

Usually IMAO flies under the radar of left-wing blogs. They want stuff to be angry about, but who could be angry at fun-loving IMAO? We only want to nuke the moon — there aren’t even people there to hurt. Still, we’ve had our run ins with some of them such as when some guy named digby criticized us for our “hostile” humor and Amanda Marcotte and her commenters once spent about 500 pages in a horribly pedantic analysis of whether a post of mine was technically “satire.”
Now, Sadly, No! — a left-wing humor site — has latched on to our Fred Thompson Facts. By itself, it’s not that notable. It seems to be a lashing out at how the left-wing blogs’ favorite candidate Edwards is perceived as being “swishy,” and now they must be further frustrated on that count since Edwards took time out of the last debate to criticize Hillary Clinton’s outfit. The humor seems borne more out of being angry than being clever, but their audience seems to like it so I can’t really criticize.
Anyway, what was interesting to me was the monologue preceding the humor where this bit caught my eye:

Not that we don’t have a begrudging sort of respect for the I.M.A.O.s of the world. After all, it’s sort of mulishly courageous to tackle humor as they do, from the opposite end of what is actually funny. Very few humorists can find comedy in the violent victimization of the marginalized by the overclass, largely because there isn’t any. But points to I.M.A.O. for trying. And even if their output isn’t — how shall we put it? — ‘funny in the slightest,’ at the very least it makes for a nice sort of homage to the Golden Age of Beer Hall comedy. . .a kind of living monument to the jackbooted stylings of those brownshirted stand-ups who, once upon a time, quite literally ‘killed’ at venues across Europe.

Now, if this was meant in jest, it’s exceptionally clever. Basically they’re poking fun at their own side and how many have an overwrought hatred of any one with a different political viewpoint. It’s much more self-aware than you’d find anywhere on DailyKos. If it’s meant even partly serious, though, then it’s rather sad.
And that’s the problem with a humor site with politics like that of the popular left-wing blogs. If you handed me something written by Glenn Greenwald and said, “Here’s this hilarious parody of a left-winger I wrote!” I’d think it was some genius satire and admire the work you put in it (“Wow. You kept it up for like five pages.”). When I first read Amanda Marcotte, I thought she was joking as she preached a kind of feminism I had long thought was made up by the older conservatives to scare us. So, when a left-wing site is sometimes trying to be funny, how can you tell when it’s saying something in jest or when it’s saying something ridiculous with a hilarious though somewhat sad earnestness? When many on that side honestly believe the government is behind 9/11 and that President Bush is going to establish a dictatorship before leaving office, how can you tell when they’re joking about something?
If I were to guess, I’d say who wrote that at Sadly, No! meant it seriously. That’s because it’s extremely rare to see left-wingers use self-deprecating humor about their own politics. I could write a whole paper on the reasons why for that, but just think about: How often do right-wingers make jokes using the left-wing’s stereotypes of them? We here at IMAO do it about every other post; it’s fun to pretend to be a mindless warmonger who hates the poor. Now how often have you seen a left-winger make a jokes using the right-wings stereotypes of them. I can’t think of very many instances; they really hate those perceptions of them and don’t find anything about them funny.
So, if I’m wrong and that statement from Sadly, No! was completely in jest, it was all the more exceptional.
What do you think? Do you think they were joking, or do they really think our humor makes us like Nazis? If so, then which posts are the Nazi ones? Maybe it was the one where I drew Kos with exaggerated Jewish features.
UPDATE:
I got a response in the comments from what seems like a dour, humorless person. I’d thought I’d put it here with my response:

1: Power. The powerless use humor to try to deflate those with power over them.

That’s one use of humor, but it’s far from the only use. Most people who play the game of “[insert group here] can’t be funny” start by making up their own esoteric definition of what constitutes humor, trying to make complex a simple human impulse.

When the powerful make fun of those beneath them, that’s not funny, it’s cruel. It comes off like cheerleaders mocking the poor kids for wearing hand-me-downs. Brandi and Candi might laugh, but it’s not “humorous.”

Ridiculing is actually the basis of all humor (or so I argue). Still, calling all the humor of one side “bullying” shows a very narrow mind which probably isn’t open to actual discussion in the first place. It also shows absolutely no understanding of humor (which isn’t to say the person is incapable of humor; just incapable of understanding it outside partisan blinders).

It’s hard to make stuff funny when one side is dedicated to bringing Americans together to make things better for all of us and the opposing side is devoted to accentuating the divisions between different groups to increase their power.

Of course, this is just one person’s retarded viewpoint of the world which is shared only by a small fringe. Who gets to say what it funny and what isn’t is the audience to the humor. You can’t just say that it’s only humor if people with my own narrow political viewpoint thinks its funny; everyone can play that game and its completely pointless.

2: Fringe reality. The fraction of Kosites who believe that Bush was ACTUALLY behind 9/11 is roughly the same as the fraction of $Con_site who believe that Hillary is ACTUALLY a lesbian Mossad agent who had Vince Foster murdered b/c he wouldn’t keep quiet about Bill importing planeloads of cocaine into Arkansas. It’s a big country full of weirdos of all types and the internet just makes them a lot louder.

Of course, this is more a political than a humor argument. Those viewpoints make the recommended diaries (though 9/11 conspiracies are now verboten from Kos). Polls — as useful as they are — show those viewpoints are significant among Democrats and thus even more significant among the fringe that is Kos. I don’t think most fervently believe the conspiracies, and it’s mainly just how silly their partisanship has gotten that they even consider them.
Anyway, the person who wrote this comment obviously has a silly little viewpoint and takes himself way too seriously. From his own definition, that makes him the pompous one to deflate using humor. If this is the writer of the Sadly, No! post, then they really should change their name to the exclamation of “That’s not funny!”
UPDATE 2:
Phelps has an example of how the violent victimization of the marginalized by the overclass can be hilarious.
I laughed.

IMAO got a shout out from Jonah Goldberg in a discussion of humor and politics.
People find funny what people find funny, and thus I never got into discussions of who is funnier: Conservatives or liberals? The answer, of course, is that conservatives will find conservatives funnier and liberals will find liberals funnier. That’s not to say there aren’t some differences in approaches to humor between them, but at the core their doing jokes based on what their audiences believe to be true. Since conservatives and liberals believe fundamentally different things about some issues, humor tailored for one will fall flat for the other.
Jonah makes a good point on the perception of who is in power makes a difference. It’s sad to say it, but a Democrat president and Democrat majorities in Congress would be a huge boon to this site.
Update: Here’s the audio-only version.