Monday July 21, 2008
THE ANCHORESS ADVISES ON COMEDY. No, really. Under the ridiculous pseudonym she uses when she's not pretending to live in a hutch, Thee Anch tells us how the Obama New Yorker cover could have been amended for maximum godly yucks:
In fairness, the reason some thought the cartoon would be misconstrued was that it was unfinished satire. The artist, Barry Blitt, simply did not go far enough; he should have included a "Honk if you love jihad" bumper sticker on the back of Obama's caftan, had Fidel Castro sitting nearby, and displayed a thermostat set to either "very cold in winter" or "sweaty in summer."
This is clearly mean to set, as David Frum once claimed to have witnessed when a Mark Steyn column was mysteriously disseminated throughout an airplane he was in, "the laughs exploding from the seat in front of me like artillery shells out of a howitzer" (which tells you everything you need to know about how conservatives experience humor). I am reminded of Groucho's comments (as rendered in Joe Adamson's bio) after the Marx Brothers screened roughs of one of their films. "Will they laugh?" asked Groucho. "Laugh? Look, they'll piss," said Chico. "I know," said Groucho, "but will they laugh?" Maybe The Anchoress should warm up with a few submissions to Reader's Digest.
Nothing stokes the hilarity like analysis, so The Anchoress takes it to the next level:
Satire is meant to be broad but -- for whatever reason, perhaps precisely because we cannot gauge Obama’s sense of humor [??? - ed.] -- the artist pulled his punch. In so doing, he ended up confusing and infuriating the Left and amusing the Right, who not only got the insult but found it particularly funny that, in their tortured explanations, the Left gave more and more exposure to those extreme ideas. Oh, irony!
Yeah, Castro, a bumper sticker, and a thermostat would have turned that around like a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. But seriously, folks: The Anchoress pleads for more laffs on Obama and, to raise the comedy stakes, sez she's doing it for Obama's own good:
Obama — if he is smart — will heed history and lighten up, before he falls from a glorious height and lands with a very cartoon-like thud. No one wants to watch him walk away with his head between his feet.
Except The Anchoress, whose blog has been an unrelenting hymn of hate toward Obama for months, and plenty of others like her. Obama has gotten off some good cracks -- like this one on Tyra Banks -- but lately he's had to focus on beating back all kinds of crazy shit about himself and his wife, promulgated by people like The Anchoress. That would harsh anyone's sense of humor. Now she's complaining that Obama doesn't make enough jokes. Truly the Lord works in mysterious ways.
But in case you've been taking her seriously, here's some material she's written for Obama:
If he truly believed that the satirical edge was missing -- and thus misleading -- he should have himself made the content plain with a genial laugh and a concurrence: "Wait," Obama could have said, "where's my fake birth certificate hanging on the wall? Why doesn't my wife have a Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat on her head? He left out my hammer and sickle!"
Can't you just hear the laughs exploding like howitzer shells? I just don't understand why Democrats don't take more seriously the advice offered to them by their mortal enemies.