In Which I Am Clever (A Collection Of Bons Mots On Frivolous Subjects)

This weekend at a family gathering people raised their eyebrows at my line of business. Megan reminded me that it’s an opportunity to polish my writing skills and critical thinking abilities. Whatevs. I have been working on my one-liners.

This week, I described “K-Ville,” a serious cop drama set in post-Katrina New Orleans, as “Storm-damaged police struggle to preserve order in a storm-damaged city and their storm-damaged lives.” And tomorrow’s premier of “Kid Nation” is getting pegged as a “lawsuit-inspiring child-labor reality show, in which 40 kids head out into the desert and try to create a society without going all “Lord Of The Flies.” Spoiler: Piggy dies at the end.”

When some kid got Tasered at a political event, I obviously had to make it the video clip of the day. But since TV With MeeVee is a blog about entertainment, I kept the tone light by pointing out that the dude was now totally famous, and that the phrase “Don’t tase me, bro, AUUUUUUGHHHHH” was hilarious. You might think that’s in poor taste, but Michael Savage characterized the arresting officer as a “Bull-Dyke Fascist,” so I’m still well within the spectrum of acceptability. Here’s the clip:

On my other blog, I characterized Chloe Sevigny as the Christa McAuliffe of fashion. (That last is not an insult I invented, but it’s still totally great.) I’m also rather proud of the closing lines of an earlier dispatch about Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Phillippe, and depression: “Still, it’s touching to know that both Reese and Ryan experienced the same overwhelming, bottomless despair I feel every day when I wake up. I mean, wow, you know? Stars! They’re just like us! Only better-looking, and with more money, and with people who care about them!”

(Yes, really, that’s how the plural of bon mot is spelled. French declines the adjectives, you know.)

Superbikes, Superboomers

Stat of the day, courtesy of the WSJ: Ultra-high performance sport motorcycles represent 10 percent of sales and 25 percent of motorcycle fatalities. Who’s buying these bikes? Baby boomers. Kids can’t afford them. Sure, young squids die on motorcycles. But a lot of middle aged folks are returning to bikes, can afford the best, and hop on after 20 years of not riding.

Apparently, teenagers aren’t the high-risk age group these days: their parents are.

Years Late, Trillions Short

Greenspan now joins the chorus of people who had a chance to make a difference years ago, but kept their mouths shut and toed the Bush line, and only now speak up to say “oh, that was wrong.”

You supported those tax cuts when you said “responsible tax cuts are good.” You and I might know what a responsible tax cut is, but you knew then that Bush was sponsoring no such thing, and that you’d be quoted as saying “tax cuts are good.”

I hope you and the retired generals all sit around in the nursing home poisoning yourselves with regret. Jerks.

Folklore and humor and terror

I was told once, by a friend taking an anthropology class, that the ubiquitous dead-baby jokes (‘what’s grosser than gross?’ and its ilk) began during the Vietnam war as a coping mechanism to make the My Lai massacre seem less horrific. They went on to say that the Challenger disaster jokes were the way that Americans dealt with that tragedy, that gallows humor was the folklore mechanism humans used to deal with the gallows.

It makes sense, sort of. I mean, there’s the classic joke about the old man in the shtetl who reads the anti-semitic rag because it contains nothing but good news about how Jews are running the world. The Jewish cultural wealth of humor could have been developed to fend off the Jewish cultural burden of tragedy.

So, how come we don’t we have any good jokes about 9/11?

I mean, we’ve got jokes about terrorists. There’s that sitcom script running around about the terror squad who starts a bowling league… there’s your standard jokes about terrorists trying to make bombs (“don’t worry, we’ve got another one in the trunk” goes back at least to the IRA days, and is basically a joke about how the Irish/Arabs/whoever are stupid). And of course you’ve got your jokes about TSA security and toenail clippers. (No, Encyclopedia Dramatica doesn’t count. Lulz are not laughter.)

I have heard only one, and that just last week:

Knock knock
Who’s there?
World Trade Center
World Trade Center Who?
YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER FORGET!

But I wouldn’t say that really constitutes “jokes” in the plural. Nor would I argue that it’s any sort of evidence that the US as a nation is coping with 9/11 in any sort of constructive way.

But as a friend pointed out, you don’t hear any Pearl Harbor jokes either. So maybe we only create jokes for some tragedies, and not others? Maybe humor isn’t the way we cope with tragedy at all? Maybe I’m just missing out on a trove of hilarious WTC-related humor (probably not.) Got any good ideas?