Joking Matters

Isn't it funny how the humor in a joke depends on who is in the punchline?

On Sunday, May 10, CBS golf analyst David Feherty wrote a piece about George W. Bush's moving to Dallas. In it, Feherty, who has visited the troops in Iraq twice in the past two years and created a foundation to help wounded soldiers, quipped:

From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though. Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.

Amid a hail of liberal outrage, Feherty quickly apologized. The joke had crossed the line from witty, trenchant political commentary into ugly tastelessness.

What then to make of the May 11 "performance" of Wanda Sykes at the White House Correspondents' dinner? Besides a vicious, sexually charged swipe at Sarah Palin, Sykes had this to say about a favorite administration whipping boy, Rush Limbaugh:

Mr. President . . . you've had your fair share of critics. ... Rush Limbaugh, one of your big critics, boy — Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails. So you’re saying, ‘I hope America fails.’ You’re like, ‘I don’t care about people losing their homes, their jobs or our soldiers in Iraq.’ He just wants our country to fail.

To me, that’s treason. He’s not saying anything differently than Osama bin Laden is saying. You know you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight

...

Rush Limbaugh — I hope the country fails. I hope his kidneys fail, how about that?

He needs a waterboarding, that’s what he needs.

The reliably leftwing Huffington Post said, "Wanda Sykes Kills." Our president evidently agreed (at least for a while, until spokesman Robert Gibbs disavowed some of Sykes's remarks). But a close inspection of the video shows that President Hope was smirking, smiling, and laughing at the remarks.

Judge for yourself.



Nice. Even nicer that our commander in chief finds that kind of nastiness-worse than anything Limbaugh has ever said on the air-entertaining. I guess it just depends on who is the butt of the joke.