Entries Tagged 'humor' ↓

This gem was written by somebody protesting the “Support Israel” rally in Chicago.

(via Power Line)

On behalf of my people, I apologize for taking “their” falafel.

I gave some of it back tonight—I stopped off at Mamoun’s after seeing my main man in I’m Your Man.

It sounds like the Sandmonkey isn’t enjoying corporate life all that much:

Mr. L. is the resident genius, and everyone listens to everything he has to say in awe and make sure that it gets implemented immedietly without questioning. Questioning, as my co-workers will tell you- would imply that you are either someone who doesn’t understand our business, in which case you are a moron and will be treated as such, or it would imply that you think that you know better than the resident Guru, which would also make you a moron, albeit a conceited one, and you will be treated as such. There must be something wrong with my e-mail, cause I never got that memo. Hell, I never seem to get any of these memos that are common knowledge to anyone but me.

Maybe he should try the Office Politics Game (with which I have no affiliation). Here’s a testimonial:

“The game of Office Politics was played in the office with 7 individuals. The amazing thing to most of them was the person everyone hated was the one who was definitely on her way to success. She was talking to all the right people in the organization… She didn’t mind kissing — or sucking up… it builds character!! It’s a great game to play with wonderful talking points. We’ve enjoyed it. Thanks.”

The Post had 8 pages on the story of the day. If you can get your hands on the dead-tree version, do so. (If you have a sense of humor, that is.)

The paper was an orgy of comic-book bloodlust. They ran one photograph—a thumbnail of Zarqawi’s dead face, with the headline “Rest in Pieces“—in five different places. I can’t find it online and I’m in dial-up hell, so I won’t spend too much time looking.

Here are the headlines:

EVIL ZARQAWI BLOWN TO HELL

ZARQAWI, KA-POWEE: TERRORIST ON TOAST

ABU MUSAB AL-CORPSE

OSAMA IS SHAKING IN HIS BOOTS, SAYS BLAIR

US STOKED MYTH TO DIVIDE & CONQUER
FIEND’S FINAL SLEEP HELPING PUT HERO GI’S TORMENT TO REST

MIKE: IT’S A ‘MESSAGE’ TO ALL THUGS

OIL DROPS ON DEATH OF ZARQAWI

‘OUR HAPPIEST DAY’

LUST FOR POWER & BLOOD TURNED PETTY THUG INTO MASS-SLAYING JIHAD …
SECRETS OF THE DOOM RAIDERS
BOMB MASTER EYED AS NEXT TERROR BOSS

From the HuffPost’s new “Eat the Press”*** media-blog-within-a-blog:

In a bizarre irony, HuffPo’s ETP has learned that The Boston Herald plagiarized Editor & Publisher’s article about Seth Mnookin’s Vanity Fair article about…plagiarism. Except for the first paragraph, today’s Boston Herald “‘Code’ blue: Vanity Fair calls Brown copycat cowboy” is almost identical to E&P’s “Upcoming ‘Vanity Fair’ Article Raises New Issues About ‘DaVinci Code’ Author,” dating from yesterday, June 6th, at 11:45 am ET. The byline on the E&P story is “E&P Staff” and the byline on the Herald story is “Inside Track,” which is the Herald’s gossip column.

Read the whole mind-boggling story.

Also, I see that Seth Mnookin’s got a blog. He’s a journalist to watch—non-mainstream MSM, maybe? (he broke lots of taboos—social, I’d say, not journalistic—in his Vanity Fair profile of Judith Miller). It’ll be interesting to see what he does with the blog.

—–

***I get it, but it’s not a very good name, especially from someone who has called for Better Branding from Democrats.

Unlike, say, the Brits, who revel in deflating the high and mighty,

(from the “Satirical London” exhibit at the Museum of London)

certain people in Lebanon don’t have a sense of humor.

Several thousand Hizbullah supporters took to the streets of Beirut’s southern suburbs late Thursday night, burning tires and blocking roads in protest against a television comedy show that impersonated the group’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. The trouble began shortly after the LBCI TV show “Bass Mat Watan” aired a skit in which an actor impersonated Nasrallah, wearing the trademark black turban and sporting a similar beard and spectacles.

Apparently, the TV show is like Saturday Night Live. Here, via Tim Cavanaugh, is an account of the skit in question:

In the scene that provoked the riot, a woman — played by a man in drag — asks Nasrallah whether Hizbullah would lay down its arms after Israel’s withdraws from the disputed border region of Shabaa.

Nasrallah replies that Hizbullah’s weapons will still be needed for “liberating the house of Abu Hassan in Detroit from his Jewish neighbor.”

Nasrallah is being mocked for his obsession with blaming Israel for everying. On Lebanese TV. Sweet.

Alan Riding, in writing up the “Satirical London” exhibit for the New York Times, noted that “religious hypocrisy, extremes of wealth and poverty, out-of-touch politicians, enslavement to fashion, obsession with gadgetry” have been the subjects of satire in England, and the targets were “lawyers, doctors, soldiers, clergymen, intellectuals, even shopkeepers. All apparently merited deflating for the power they wielded.”

As to the significance of satire in our own era:

In an atmosphere of growing religious intolerance and social conformity, sustained by fear, political correctness and electoral apathy, satire can probably aid democracy by stretching the limits of the acceptable. That this may offend is precisely its value. Satire should disturb as well as amuse.

It is not always possible. In dictatorships it can be positively foolish to mock rulers, although satire can sometimes be disguised as parody or allegory. And in many parts of the world there is no tradition of questioning authority through wit or caricature; in such countries two preferred targets, religious and political power, are usually taboo for satirists.

Sacha Baron Cohen portrays Kazakhstan’s sixth most famous man and a leading journalist from the State run TV network in the comedy Borat (due sometime this year).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Borat, here’s a little background from the New Yorker:

[T]he press secretary for the Embassy of Kazakhstan, wants to clear up a few misconceptions about his country. Women are not kept in cages. The national sport is not shooting a dog and then having a party. You cannot earn a living being a Gypsy catcher. Wine is not made from fermented horse urine. It is not customary for a man to grab another man’s khrum. “Khrum” is not the word for testicles.

These falsehoods, and many others, have been spread by Borat, a character on “Da Ali G Show,” which recently finished its second season on HBO. Like Ali G, Borat is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British comedian who specializes in prank interviews. As Borat, Cohen has told a dating service that he is looking for a girl with “plow experience,” persuaded a meeting of Oklahoma City officials to observe a ten-minute silence in memory of the (fictitious) Tishnik Massacre, and, most notably, led a country-and-Western bar in a sing-along of “In My Country There Is Problem,” whose chorus goes: “Throw the Jew down the well / So my country can be free / You must grab him by his horns / Then we have a big party.”

I gotta say, I find it fascinating that Sacha Baron Cohen is a cousin of Simon Baron Cohen

Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University.

Interesting discussion of the professor’s controversial theory of autism as a manifestation of the “extreme male brain” here.

I’m not telling my own archetype, but I invite you to have a laugh figuring out where you belong.

(via Hit and Run)

Whiny-brat finger-pointing name-caller Eric Alterman started it, by dissing Time magazine for filling its opinion pages with “vitriol, anger and abuse, almost always directed at liberals.” He called out (again) Joe Klein (for the sin of “frequently praising the centrist Democratic Leadership Council”), Andrew Sullivan (whom Alterman described as “famously gay”), and “fire-breathing neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer.”

Then he stuck it to new Time contributor

Ana Marie Cox, a putative liberal whose specialty on her blog, Wonkette, were posts about–sorry, Mom–”ass-fucking,” as if to prove the conservatives’ point about liberal perversity.

Cox responded (and drew blood) on Romenesko. I reprint in full:

From ANA MARIE COX: Just a small note to add to Eric Alterman’s rather petulant column on the rightward tilt of TIME columnists. He calls me a “putative liberal,” which is sweet, because I thought the Huffington Post comedy police had torn up my liberal credentials completely when I didn’t laugh hard enough at Stephen Colbert. He also claims that my “specialty” on Wonkette “were posts about — sorry, Mom — ‘ass-fucking.’” Sorry, indeed. By even responding to Eric’s off-hand remark, I am probably opening myself up to all sorts barbs — as it were — but I wrote 10 posts a day for almost two years. If most — or even a large portion — of them were about sodomy, surely I would have been paid extra. While I am not ashamed to have delved occasionally into the nether regions in my search for pointed political humor, it saddens me that Eric remembers me for those jokes and not, say, the ones at his expense.

And she linked to the handy chart you see below (from April 1, 2005). Sweet.

Czech politics—at a disgruntled dentists’ conference:

Here’s a handy formula, courtesy of a London literary agent (who’s peddling a forthcoming book):

To determine if BEA [Book Expo America] is good for the Jews, apply the JISM [Judological Institute of Spiritual Mathematics] formula,* which is based on rating a subject according to the following criteria, on a scale of one to seven (according to Kabbalah, God created the world with seven divine attributes):

• Backlash: What is the anti-Semitic potential of the subject under discussion?
• Impact: How influential is the subject outside the U.S.?
• J-factor: How Jewish is the topic?
• Tsuris (Yiddish for “trouble”): How much does the subject foster tsuris, the default position of world Jewry?
• The outcome of this evaluation will be either “Good” or “Not Good,” since there is no such thing as bad in Judology.

* Do not try this on your own. Please buy Yes, but Is It Good for the Jews? published by Bloomsbury [in Britain] this fall, to guide you through the labyrinth of Judology. Buying is good for the Jews; borrowing is not.

(from Publishers Weekly)