A few nights ago I was out at a wine bar in town and as I left with my friends, I got to partake in the following conversation:
Friend 1: "Gosh, I wish I still had my bike!"
Friend 2: "Did you ever give it a name?"
Friend 1: "No! Do bikes have souls?"
Me: "You don't need a soul to have a name. His wife doesn't call him 'Mr. Vice-President' you know."
What got me thinking was the quip that I made. I'm researching political humour right now and my own joke took me back. I had participated, unconsciously, in the trivialization of political figures which I believe is diminishing legitimate political discourse. Certainly it is likely that Dick Cheney has no soul, but to automatically target a politician with a meaningless joke is to propagate the kind of attitude which helps the Daily Show to be the most popular "smart" comedy on TV. It isn't smart and it isn't political; the Daily Show does not require viewers to know anything about currents events or politics. The jokes are as topical as anything the late great Milton Berle constructed in his Altzheimer haze (Hey everybody, what do you think of the Tea Kettle Scandal huh? That President Harding sure has a head that looks like a tea kettle, ho ho ho).
My point is that political humour is a very effective tool for informing discourse, but that the form it takes in today's mainstream is vulgar and uninformative. Things without souls sure as hell do have names. The Daily Show is a name. Son of a bitch.
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