Word: joking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...think if you're rooting for Obama there's plenty wrong with it. If you're rooting for the New Yorker ... I think there's a cleaner way to do the joke. Cleaner in the sense that it might communicate to a larger audience - which is the thing that's driven me nuts about the urban myths about Obama. They hate him because they don't like his Christian preacher, and because he's a Muslim. Put those two together...
...white lady--we need that more than ever. Yet the fear of sounding bigoted is precisely what has made (white, male) late-night comics and their (largely white) audiences tentative. (Dave Chappelle, your country needs you!) In June, Jon Stewart had to assure his audience after an Obama joke, "You're allowed to laugh...
This is why true believers suspect satirists, even those--as for liberals upset with the New Yorker--in their own camp. Satirists don't make crystal clear how you're supposed to read their work. They don't give you a road map to correct thinking, because a joke explained is neither funny nor persuasive. They give voice to the enemy's beliefs. And this makes it easy to call them traitors...
...irony and satire, in fact, is a great unifier of the left and the right. Daniel Radosh, in his book Rapture Ready!, about Christian pop culture, explains why irony is anathema to Fundamentalist entertainers: it is too dangerous to introduce the slightest possibility that someone might not get the joke and thus might be led to moral error. Better safe than funny...
...supplanted) precisely because they spray seltzer in the face of the official, inoffensive, phony public discourse. Unlike many politicians, they say what they think; unlike much of the media, they trust their audience's intelligence. That we should rely so heavily on them to do so is the biggest joke in American public life. I wish I could laugh...