A Beauty Queen from Alaska walks into a Presidential Election...

Hey everybody, so get this! John McCain, the semi-senile, confused, out of touch Republican Presidential candidate just picked his running mate. Check this out: She’s from Wasilla Alaska, she’s a former beauty queen, she’s got like no experience and she hunts moose with her bare hands. And McCain chose her to be his Vice President! Isn’t that funny?

Hello? Did you hear what I said?

Oh, you already heard this one.


Ok, fine, but listen to my hilarious take on it: She’s like this hockey mom with 5 kids and she makes McCain look even older than he already does, and they think she’s going to win over women voters even though her views are completely opposite of what most women want or need!

Get it?

No?

Alright then, I’ll do my dead-on impression of her, which happens to be the same voice I do when I recite lines from any character in the movie Fargo, except instead of “So is that your friend in the wood-chipper then?” I say things like “What does a Vice President do every day?”
Ha! Get it? See because she’s so inexperienced and lives in a state that is practically another country, I’m portraying her as someone so unqualified that she would say she doesn’t even know what a VP does!

Zing! Nailed that one…Ha ha!...what?

She actually did say that? Holy shit.

Wait, come back! I can make this funnier, give me another chance!

What is happening to me? I used to be someone who could get a few laughs by ranting about real issues and putting my own unique comic spin on them. Why can’t I do that anymore? Today I feel like the guy who just repeats lines from a Seinfeld episode that everyone has already seen and laughed at, and expects credit for remembering the bits and reciting them verbatim.

I got nothing. Yesterday I heard the news about some unknown Governor named Sarah Palin being picked as the Republican Vice President nominee and I actually started to drool a little bit. This is just the kind of stuff I like to make fun of!

So why doesn’t my skewed view of this surprising news seem funny to anybody? Not even to me?

Oh, no. I know what this is. The McCain campaign has somehow stumbled upon the perfect defense plan for the ridicule they previously seemed so vulnerable to. They have turned the country’s sense of humor back in on itself! It’s like the whole two negative charges make a positive thing, or something like that. It’s a goddamned self-awareness double-reverse! When reality becomes so ridiculous that to flip it on its head actually makes the comedian seem like the one who isn’t joking, that is Satire Kryptonite in its purest form!

You can’t satirize a group of people who are capable of creating real-life scenarios so far beyond that of human imagination that the mere facts generate a daily supply of comic genius without any interpretation.

And it isn’t just me. I noticed this disturbing trend appearing elsewhere as soon as the news broke. As much as I love my daily doses of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s twists on political events, as well as most of the MSNBC comedians’ straight-faced “analysis”, I did find most of their jokes on the Palin story a little…predictable. It was as if I’d heard them before. In the news reports. One of the most important elements of a good joke involves a certain level of surprise. It’s hard to be clever about something everyone can see coming. That comic edge doesn’t come from pointing out what everybody already realizes, it comes from doing the unexpected. Like, I don’t know, for example… CHOOSING SARAH PALIN AS YOUR RUNNING MATE!

Look out funny Americans, John McCain is defeating us at our own game.

I thought for a while that it might actually be good for our national humorists to see John McCain win the Presidency. Sure it could completely destroy our civilization in a hurry, but we’d go out laughing. I realize now that we must work even harder to keep him out of office, as clearly he even intends to take away our basic right to feel superior to him through mockery. We can’t laugh at someone who beats us to the punch line.

Stay focused, America, at least we now really know what we’re up against.

And say, did you hear the one about the guy who wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade and once called his own wife the C-word in public, then went on to pick a female running mate just to convince women that they should vote for him because he cares about their rights?

What’s that? Yeah, I don’t get it either.