Category: Humor

Surgery

Dave Barry reports from Iowa

There I found a clot of seasoned political journalists, who briefed me on the Democratic race. The big news was that John Edwards, who had been stagnant, was surging, while at the same time John Kerry — who had faltered early in the race, then surged, then re-faltered — was now surging AGAIN.

This bodes badly for Howard Dean, who used to be the Lone Surger out here, as well as traditional Iowa-caucus winner Dick Gephardt, who has, frankly, been unable to surge. He is surge-impaired, and he badly needs surgification in Iowa if he is to survive New Hampshire, where, word has it, Wesley Clark, who had been faltering, is now surging like a madman. He’s the Surgin’ General.

You may think I’m making this stuff up, but it’s a fairly accurate portrayal of how political journalists talk after weeks of being forced to write thousands upon thousands of words based on virtually zero hard information.

Still America’s Finest News Source

From The Onion

Grandmother Can’t Believe They Let People With Tattoos On Price Is Right
GREAT BEND, KS—Grandmother of nine Sadie Grunfelder, 71, expressed surprise Tuesday when a tattooed contestant was allowed to play “Buy Or Sell” on the long-running game show The Price Is Right. “I can’t believe that Bob Barker would let someone with a tattoo up on stage,” Grunfelder said from her recliner. “I would think they’d at least make him cover up that terrible thing. What if there are children somewhere, home sick from school, watching this show?” Luckily, Grunfelder’s two other means of access to the outside world—the AARP newsletter and reruns of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman—remain tattoo-free.

First-Generation American’s Job Taken By His Father
READING, PA—Miguel Martinez, 48, who immigrated to the U.S. 30 years ago, last week lost his leather-cutting job at GST AutoLeather, Inc. to his 66-year-old father Roberto. “I came to this country in 1974 to make a better life for my family,” Martinez said Monday. “But in December, they moved the factory where I’ve been working for 22 years down to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I love my father, but that goddamn beaner stole my job.” Martinez’s $18-an-hour duties will now be performed by his father for $7 a day.

Mr. President

Mark Katz has an amusing account of his time as a Clinton joke-writer. The essay, excerpted from his forthcoming book Clinton & Me, is well worth reading. The following sidebar is also delightful.

When brainstorming humor speeches, every sentence in every article I read enters my brain as an impulse stimulus, a potential setup line that dares my gray matter to spit back a punch line. Late one night as I was cramming jokes for Clinton’s first White House Correspondents Dinner, I came across an article about the hundred day accomplishments of previous presidents, wherein it was mentioned parenthetically that America’s ninth president, William Henry Harrison, died on his thirty-second day in office. With a little subtraction, and the addition of context, a joke for Clinton’s upcoming speech was born: “I’m not doing so bad. I mean, at this point in his administration, William Henry Harrison had been dead for sixty-eight days!”

The Monday following the speech, sometime before noon, I was still damp from a late-morning shower when the telephone rang.

Hello?”
“White House operator calling for Mark Katz.”
“This is Mark Katz.”
“Please hold for the president of the United States . . .”

Fisher. It had to be Fisher. Dating back to our days together in junior high, my friend Fisher occasionally subjected me to his expertly executed telephone hoaxes. With a tidbit of information and plausible impersonation, he had played me for the fool a hundred times before. That is why as I stood there in my bath towel, I was not predisposed to believe that I was actually holding for the president of the United States. I pressed the phone to my ear and prepared to analyze the voice that would greet me after my stay on hold. My brain was on high alert.

“Hello, Mark?”
BRAIN.- Not enough syllables to make a conclusive identification. Proceed with EXTREME caution!!!
“Hello.”
“Mark, you did great work helping out on the jokes for the White House Correspondents Dinner. You did a terrific job and I just wanted to call and thank you again.”
BRAIN: Holy shit! If this is Fisher, it’s his best work yet. WARNING: The next words you say may be used to mock you for the rest of your life.
“You bet, sir.”

I was determined to maintain my reticence until I achieved a higher degree of certainty. My silence compelled the caller to move the conversation forward.
“I really loved that William Henry Harrison joke. That one still cracks me up. . . . already been dead for sixty-eight days! Ha!”
BRAIN. Identity confirmed! This is the third time the president has mentioned that he loved the William Henry Harrison joke. YOU ARE TALKING TO THE PRESIDENT! REPEAT: YOU ARE TALKING TO THE PRESIDENT!!!
Now I was excited.
“You got a great laugh on that one, Mr. President.” It was the first time in the conversation I dared address him with that, but there were plenty more to come.

This, I would learn, is a common phenomenon among people who find themselves in a conversation with a president. They interject the words “Mr. President” into nearly every sentence, as if afflicted with a very proper strain of Tourette’s syndrome. There is just something about talking to the president that makes you punctuate your sentences with the words “Mr. President.” Not because he wants to hear it-he knows very well who he is–but because you just love to hear yourself say it. After all, when is the next time you’ll get to say “Mr. President” in a sentence? A co-op board meeting? More than that, interjecting those words adds import to any sentence you might say. Compare these sentences:
A. Cheese sandwiches are very tasty.
B. Cheese sandwiches are very tasty, Mr. President.

This condition is only made worse by the fact that speaking to the president can also make you talkative to the point of babbling. This happens for much the same reason: you are not really talking to the president, you are listening to yourself talking to the president. Your brain, so absorbed in listening to the conversation, becomes a cognitive bystander engaged in an internal monologue that goes something like this:
I am talking to the president.
I am talking to the president.
I just said something to the president.
The president is responding to something I just said.

For the rest of my life, I will be able to preface what I just said to the president with the words, ‘ As I once said to the president …’ ”
Does anyone here remember what I said to the president? I’m gonna need it for when I tell people this story.
The president stopped talking. It is my turn to say something. Now I am going to listen to what I am about to say to the president. I wonder what it will be?
As it turned out, here’s what I said to the president next: “You know what Mel Brooks says, Mr. President: ‘Comedy equals tragedy plus time.'”
He had no response to that. Very few people quote Mel Brooks to the president. I explained further.
“What I mean, Mr. President, is that joke probably would not have gone over too well if Millard Fillmore said it.”
“Millard Fillmore completed the term of Zachary Taylor,” he said. “John Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison. But I think I know what you mean . . .”
He’d given me more credit for my wrong reference than I deserved. I didn’t know that Millard Fillmore had completed the term of anyone–I had just pulled out the name of a funny-sounding, obscure, mid-nineteenth century president. At this point, he must have remembered that he had called to thank me, not to administer a pop quiz.
“Anyway, I just loved that William Henry Harrison joke.”

The president’s tone let me know that this conversation was winding down. He encouraged me to fax him jokes if ever I had an idea for something funny he might say. A few seconds later, he was saying good-bye. Before it was over, I got to hear myself say it one last time:

“Thank you for calling, Mr. President.”

Football Dads’ Ultimate Goal: A Kickoff The Old Block

Joel Achenbach on father-child bonding.

A special pleasure of fatherhood at this time of year is teaching a child the art of watching football on TV all day long and into the night as the living room becomes a debris field of beer cans and pizza crusts and the child increasingly begs to be allowed to go outside and play, or some such request that is totally inappropriate to the game situation.

“Daddy, I’m going to my room to read a book,” the kid will say.

“On fourth-and-goal???” the father will answer.

Standards

Cullen Murphy writes about standards in Setting the Bar.

Some standards aren’t worthy of the name in the first place, and in any event standards will always be in flux. But surely there are a handful on which we might all agree to hold the line—this far and no further, unto the end of days. To start this long-overdue public conversation, I’ll propose ten.

I. “EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK” (“Los empleados deben lavarse las manos antes de regresar al trabajo”).

II. “Women and children first” (except maybe Ann Coulter).

III. Notoriety does not denote “famousness,” enormity does not denote “bigness,” and religiosity does not denote “religiousness.”

IV. “The bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than 2 3/4 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length. The bat shall be one piece of solid wood.” — Official rules, Major League Baseball

V. “Honey, you look great!” (still the only correct answer).

VI. “Parents should never issue birth announcements or write letters of thanks that pretend to be coming directly from the baby.” — Miss Manners

VII. “First, do no harm.” — Hippocrates

VIII. The federal adulteration limits for cocoa powder (“75 or more insect fragments per 50 grams”) and chocolate (“60 or more insect fragments per 100 grams”).

IX. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” — The Golden Rule (worth a try?)

And finally,

X. Anything that does “little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat” deserves an award.

Last-Minute Shoppers, Looking to Buy Time

Joel Achenbach

So at the last minute you make one of those grab-and-go, search-and-destroy, commando-raid trips to the mall, an emergency strike — you have no time to shop so you’re just going to buy. This is the time of year when a shopper needs a carefully defined mission, a clearly stated objective, an insertion and exit strategy, and possibly a helmet and elbow pads. …

Semiprofessional consumers have turned the mall and the big box store and even an all-American crescent-wrench-and-lampshade-selling place like Sears into a hostile wilderness of choice. No one is allowed to buy anything without considering 500 variations on a theme, without pondering the different sizes, models, colors, special features, add-ons, auxiliary components, accessories, warranties and payment plans. In short, buying anything today is like buying a computer.

Monday Morning Monologue

From The Washington Monthly

“Saddam Hussein…was captured Sunday without incident — or as the Pentagon reported it, ‘in a blazing gun battle with Jessica Lynch.’… ”

“President Bush said Halliburton should repay any overcharge [for gasoline in Iraq] to the American taxpayer. And then he awarded the taxpayer overcharge handling contract to Bechtel….”

Funniest joke found

From Nature, “First results in from largest-ever look at humour.”

One of the study’s main goals is to uncover the funniest joke in the world. So far, the joke that has tickled the most funnybones is:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are going camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up. “Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce.” Watson says, “I see millions of stars and even if a few of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life.” Holmes replied: “Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!”

The study has uncovered intriguing regional differences in humour, with German participants finding the largest proportion of the jokes “very funny”, and Canadians the smallest proportion.

Different countries also have different favourite jokes. Displaying what Wiseman calls a “Carry On” style of humour, the British plump for the following gag:

A man goes to the doctor and says: “Doctor, there’s a piece of lettuce sticking out of my bottom.” The doctor asks him to drop his trousers and examines him. The man asks, “Is it serious, doctor?” and the doctor replies, “I’m sorry to tell you but this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

French voters prefer the cynical humour of:

“You’re a high-priced lawyer! If I give you $500, will you answer two questions for me?” “Absolutely! What’s the second question?”

Life imitates Monty Python

As David Bernstein noted Monday on The Volokh Conspiracy, “the incident [see Absurdity alert and Absurdity alert part two] is reminiscent of the ‘Jehovah’ scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian:”

OFFICIAL: You have been found guilty by the elders of the town of uttering the name of our Lord, and so, as a blasphemer,…
CROWD: Ooooh!
OFFICIAL: …you are to be stoned to death.
CROWD: Ahh!
MATTHIAS: Look. I– I’d had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was, ‘That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.’
CROWD: Oooooh!
OFFICIAL: Blasphemy! He’s said it again!
CROWD: Yes! Yes, he did! He did!…
OFFICIAL: Did you hear him?!
CROWD: Yes! Yes, we did! We did!…
WOMAN #1: Really!
[silence]
* * * *
OFFICIAL: * * * Now, where were we?
MATTHIAS: Look. I don’t think it ought to be blasphemy, just saying ‘Jehovah’.
CROWD: Oooh! He said it again! Oooh!…
OFFICIAL: You’re only making it worse for yourself!
MATTHIAS: Making it worse?! How could it be worse?! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!
CROWD: Oooooh!…
OFFICIAL: I’m warning you. If you say ‘Jehovah’ once more– [MRS. A. stones OFFICIAL]
Right. Who threw that?
MATTHIAS: [laughing]
[silence]
OFFICIAL: Come on. Who threw that?
CROWD: She did! It was her! He! He. Him. Him. Him. Him. Him. Him.
OFFICIAL: Was it you?
MRS. A.: Yes.
OFFICIAL: Right!
MRS. A.: Well, you did say ‘Jehovah’.
CROWD: Ah! Ooooh!…
[CROWD stones MRS. A.]
OFFICIAL: Stop! Stop, will you?! Stop that! Stop it! Now, look! No one is to stone anyone until I blow this whistle! Do you understand?! Even, and I want to make this absolutely clear, even if they do say ‘Jehovah’.
CROWD: Ooooooh!…
[CROWD stones OFFICIAL]
WOMAN #1: Good shot!
[clap clap clap]

Absurdity alert part two

From a letter to the editor in The Cavalier Daily

Kara Rowland’s Nov. 21 article, “Casteen reacts to U.Va. employee’s remarks,” included an alleged quote from a U.Va. employee. This quote included a racial epithet, something I’d rather not repeat.

My question is, was it really necessary to explicitly write out that word? I take this akin to a public official using a curse word. Typically, those are paraphrased into something we can understand, but this epithet, which is arguably worse in motive than those, gets printed.

I just ask that The Cavalier Daily exercise more judgment in printing words that can be read by anyone around the world.

Pinaki Santra

Your Cheatin’ Cart – The problem with Hummer’s new ad

From Slate

For sheer entertainment value, this is a fantastic commercial. Visually arresting. Engrossing narrative. (And an unexpectedly wussy, un-Hummer-y art-house pedigree: It was directed by the guy who did Shine, and the ad’s cinematographer worked on Amélie.) Plus, of course, the kick-ass Who song. My problem is with its underlying ethics.

1. The Hummer kid cheats….
2. He endangers other racers….
3. What about the poor dog? We see it left abandoned in its now-useless doghouse, peering sadly through gaping holes where the slats the kid stole used to be. Conclusion: The Hummer kid hoards earth’s precious resources, sating his own vanity at the expense of less fortunate, voiceless members of society….

Startling news

According to a report on archaeological excavations at Jamestown, Virginia, published in National Geographic last year, “Of the 6,000 settlers the London-based Virginia Company sent to Jamestown between 1607 and 1625, 4,800 died.”

Where are these 1,200 survivors, most of whom most be at least 400 years old by now?