Okay, so Laura Bush told some edgy jokes the other night and now there’s a kerfuffle. Michelle Malkin didn’t like the humor – well, that’s not entirely accurate, but I’ll explain more about it in a moment – and she’s catching a pretty good ration of poo for it.
I, personally, don’t quite understand the ire against her for holding that opinion. Most of it has come in the form of “lighten up” and calls her humorless. That, my friends, is absolute bunk.
It’s clear that Michelle didn’t like the jokes. Okay, that’s fair enough. There are a lot of jokes out there I don’t find funny, or I find over the line (which, I know is surprising, considering that I once killed in a room full of friends doing about a 15-minute riff of “Stephen Hawking, Stand-Up Comedian” that I’d never repeat to anyone but those friends). She did tell a couple jokes that I’d classify as “risque” and maybe even bordering on the crass. The jokes themselves, though, weren’t what Michelle was criticizing as much as it was that Laura Bush was the one telling them.
Michelle invoked the name of Wonkette and, I think this is where the problem has come in. Michelle wasn’t comparing the First Lady’s Amateur Standup Night to the vapid slutfest that Wonkette calls a blog. What she was saying is that Laura Bush is far too smart, witty, and humorous to have to resort to “low” humor. It would be like Johnny Carson coming out on stage (well, not now because all he’d be able to say is “BRAIIIIIIINS!”) and doing a Sam Kinison riff. It wouldn’t suit him at all. It wouldn’t reflect well on him because he had built an entire career on playing his jokes pretty much on the clean side of the aisle and relying on innuendo to do the “dirty” work for him. Kinison did the outright vulgarity. Carson didn’t. Difference of styles, see?
That’s what Michelle’s point was. Wonkette is the one who does the penis jokes, not the First Lady. That she did them meant she had to stoop a bit to deliver them. As John Derbyshire said today on The Corner:
I’ll admit to being a South Park con. I mean, I laugh at the show, I like gross humor, I believe PC is such a horrible and oppressive thing that no amount of scorn, mockery, or insult directed at it can ever be enough.
HOWEVER, I am not happy about the First Lady cracking off-color jokes. It’s a matter of compartmentalization. I like a dirty joke, and deliver a good unforced belly laugh when I hear one… in the right surroundings. Which probably means, at a bar, with a few old guy friends I’m comfortable with. If my minister were to crack that same joke from the pulpit, I’d get myself another church.
He’s exactly right. There is behavior for friends and family and behavior for everyone else. Laura Bush was definitely not among friends and family, considering that she was surrounded by White House reporters and liberal celebrities like Jane Fonda. She was basically casting her pearls before swine. Sure, they ate it up – but let’s face it, most of them are braying fools who would have laughed just as hard had she come out and done a bad Carrot Top routine complete with stupid props. It doesn’t take much to kill in front of a crowd that’s a little liquored up and ready to laugh if for no other reason than to prove that they have a sense of humor.
So on Michelle’s point that Laura probably shouldn’t have stooped to the level of low humor to get laughs, I definitely agree. On the point of whether or not she was funny, I suspect we disagree. But that’s okay. Michelle’s sense of humor is markedly different from mine, I suspect. But she does have one – even a cursory reading of her blog proves that. And she seems to be a fairly avid reader of two blogs that will never win the Pat Robertson Shiny Happy Clean Humor Seal of Approval: Ace of Spades HQ and Protein Wisdom. Both of those blogs are very funny, but neither of them are sites you’d want to show your aged grandmother. So it’s complete bollocks that Michelle Malkin has no sense of humor.
I think this is a whole lot of nothing about a whole lot of nothing but, alas, this is the life of a conservative – we can’t let anything go by without chewing it over and over like a cow with a big wad of cud.
