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Friday, May 16, 2008
Equal Time Follies
TGIF. Here's how the blogging thing works. You get an idea that's going to be great and all you need is to round up all the links and other material for your witty observations. So we came across The Onion's very funny piece about McCain and decided to locate other funny clips about all the rival presidential candidates. Except that we couldn't. When you do a search for "Obama" and "humor" at YouTube, you get weird results -- like clips of Obama speeches where Obama supporters think he's displaying a sense of humor. But that's just plain wrong. The man has no sense of humor. And then you get other clips from angry conservatives who think they're being funny, although what they're really being is leadenly satirical. Like this:
The closest we could find to actual humor was this:
Which is cute but basically a derivative commentary on "Obama Girl" and other YouTube phenomena -- in other words, the media commenting on the media, not on the candidate in any illuminating way.
It gets worse when you get to the next tier down, the candidates who don't have any chance of getting elected but are still somehow annoyingly there.
We looked hard for Ron Paul humor, and this is the best of a totally miserable and unfunny lot:
Sad. (It was also the first instance of a YouTube search phenom we'll tell you about later.) The news is even worse for Ralph Nader. Nobody thinks he's worth doing a dedicated clip of funny about. Understandable -- the only more humorless citizen of Planet Earth than Ralph is his sister Laura -- but it's kind of pitiful when all you can find is a stand-up routine that bashes our savior from evil corporatist America in passing:
His jokes about Bush and Cheney are funnier. Even his Kerry jokes. Sheesh.
Worst of all, though, is the result of a YouTube search for "humor Bob Barr." The first page of listings doesn't vary at all from the results of a search for "Bob Barr." Is that a comment on YouTube? Or Bob Barr?
Our guess is, both. (Much the same as what we found for Ron Paul, actually, with the exception of what we cited above and a few seriously lame serious spoofs.)
The experience has given us a new theory, though. Political survivors in America are likely to be the candidates who inspire the most original and truly funny humor. GWB has certainly helped himself no end on that score with his constant verbal gaffes and other miscues. If we're right, though, McCain has to be favored and Obama may be in serious trouble come election day. HE JUST ISN'T FUNNY, either personally or as an object of deliberate joking or satire.
Did we just discover something important? Sorry. That was never our intention. This is only the Friday Follies.
