Two weeks ago, a disturbing headline showed up on a prominent feminist blog about John McCain: “Will someone tell John McCain that the wife-beating jokes just aren’t funny?”
In an interview with the Las Vegas Sun, McCain had been asked why he had appointed the lieutenant governor of the state to chair his Nevada campaign over Gov. Jim Gibbons:
Reporter: Why snub the governor? Maybe it’s the governor’s approval rating and you are running from him like you are from the president?
McCain: (Chuckling) And I stopped beating my wife just a couple of weeks ago….
Choosing to take the well-known euphemism for an unfair question seriously, the blogger responded, “I find the idea that a presidential candidate could flippantly throw around references to domestic violence disturbing. I mean, if he’s making jokes like this on the campaign trail, what in the world would he do on the policy front?”
Feminists: so independent, they parody themselves! I should have known this extravagant display of humorlessness would not be an isolated incident, but a gauge for the rest of a stultifying summer.
Indeed, the true extent of liberal humorlessness was revealed this week when the Obama campaign and Obama supporters turned on the left-leaning New Yorker, calling its satirical cover art of Barack and Michelle Obama, “tasteless and offensive.” John McCain’s campaign, which despite the beliefs of people who read the New Yorker, is quick to defend its opponent from scurrilous attacks (and even some legitimate ones), agreed.
The now-infamous image of Barack as a sandal-shod Muslim in traditional garb fist-bumping a militant, ‘fro-coifed Michelle below a portrait of Osama bin Laden, encircled in the smoke of a roasting American flag was intended as a satirical attack on right-wing fears of Obama and his wife, and to delegitimize serious concerns about their associations and beliefs by painting them as outlandish.
Instead, the intended parody of right-wing attacks was so ham-handed as to become a parody of liberal stereotypes about conservative voters. The resulting outcry from the Obama camp and allies became a parody of a chameleon-esque liberal candidate’s fundamental misunderstanding of right-leaning voters. And, the subsequent examination of political humor and its appropriate applicability to Barack Obama has been a parody of liberal oversensitivity.
The cartoon should have left the urbane readers of the New Yorker chuckling over their dinner-party drinks at the legions of illiterate right-wingers west of the Hudson River that they imagined were misinterpreting the clever satire. Instead, it reduced them to desperately reading their quinine bubbles for the appropriate response to Obama jokes.
The New York Times quickly swooped in to rescue Manhattan sophisticates everywhere from insecurity, when a Bill Carter article asserted that even professional comedians have trouble making fun of Obama properly. Three reasons were given for their dismal stabs at skewering the Democratic nominee:
“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who once wrote political jokes for Johnny Carson… “He’s not a comical figure,” Barry said.
“A lot of people are excited about his candidacy,” Mike Sweeney of Conan O’Brien’s show told the New York Times. “It’s almost like: ‘Hey, don’t go after this guy. He’s a fresh face; cut him some slack.’ ”
Finally, Carter notes, “the question of race is also mentioned as one reason Mr. Obama has proved to be so elusive a target for satire.”
Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” has been relegated to informing his comically confused, Obama-smitten audiences, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.”
But the truth is, very few are sure if they’re allowed to laugh at, much less mock, Barack, and he’s shown no inclination to give license by laughing at himself. A self-serious candidate has combined with a fan base paralyzed by their fear of laughing at the wrong thing, and a media full of writers who are admittedly pulling punches. The result, if we continue down this road, may be the dourest campaign we’ve seen in years.
This week, liberals became paralyzed by their own political correctness, and the only people left laughing were the conservatives for whom the attack was originally meant. It’d be better for Obama and his supporters alike if the comic figure he most closely resembled were not Wile E. Coyote, ever-earnest but snared in a trap of his own making.
Mary Katharine Ham is online editor of The Washington Examiner and a Fox News analyst.
