"Just Google it: knowingly inappropriate Clinton."

Says Meade, after I say "Send me that link," as I often do, when he's talking about something he's read on line and sets off my blogging instinct. In this case, he's already closed that tab, and he'd have to Google it and then IM the link, a 2-step process, and if I just Google "knowingly inappropriate Clinton," he's says, "it'll come right up."*

He's right. Here: "There is no doubt in my mind that we have never done anything knowingly inappropriate in terms of taking money to influence any kind of American government policy."

Oh, he never did anything knowingly inappropriate. Knowingly. That's the key word. Whatever he did, he's telling us, if anything's wrong, he's got a plan to say he didn't know it was wrong.

And so it is time once again to roll out the famous "Was that wrong?" scene from "Seinfeld":



Why it was only just about exactly one year ago that I went looking for that because it was the perfect paraphrase of something some prominent American political figure was saying. (In the scene, George had sex on his desk with the office cleaning woman and, confronted by his boss, says: "Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell you I gotta plead ignorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frouned upon, you know, cause I've worked in a lot of offices and I tell you people do that all the time."

That old post ends without revealing which American political figure got me thinking about the old "Was that wrong?" defense, but I did say the context provided a humorously useful clue. So it must have been Bill Clinton, right?
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* I read this paragraph out loud to Meade, to get his okay to use those quotes. He suggests an additional sentence: "And he's already onto the next thing, which is 'Arlene, I'm sorry for what I've done....'" I play that and say, "That goes well with Bill Clinton. Hillary, I'm sorry for what I've done..." And Meade says "He's a sexual predator." The guy in the song is a flat-out murderer.

Seinfeld switches places with Letterman and interviews him.

How can you retire? You're a talk show animal, half man, half desk.

"Good stand-up comedy cannot be safe; it must shock or surprise an audience."

"Some comics can do it magnificently with insights about socks, but the best do it with bracing commentary about the stuff that really matters to us. Sex, race, politics and religion have been the source of some of the best comedy I�ve seen, but the process of figuring out how to talk about difficult issues is going to involve errors that are potentially painful for people in the audience."

Writes the comedian Guy Branum, trying to help Trevor Noah off the hook for all the non-PC stuff in his Twitter archive.

By the way, "insights about socks" is a reference to Jerry Seinfeld. Many, many comedians over the years have observed that socks get lost in the laundry. But this is how you do it "magnificently":



ADDED: By the way, if Trevor Noah can be brushed off and set aright, can we bring back Michael Richards?

"Antonin Scalia�s unintentional humor."

I don't think that was unintentional.

What Scalia said was:

What about Congress? You really think Congress is just going to sit there while all of these disastrous consequences ensue? I mean, how often have we come out with a decision such as the �� you know, the bankruptcy court decision? Congress adjusts, enacts a statute that takes care of the problem. It happens all the time. Why is that not going to happen here?

What got the laugh was the response � "Well, this Congress?" � from the Solicitor General.

Steve Benen, whose headline I've used as the post title, fails to appreciate the comic skill of the straight man. As Jerry Seinfeld once explained:

Where did the idea of, in Seinfeld, your character being a comedian for a profession, but be the straight man for your friends, come from? I always thought that juxtapositioning for the show was genius.

Very good observation and analysis on your part, Baxter. You are truly exhibiting a good comedic eye. The reason I would play straight was it was funnier for the scene. And very few people have ever remarked on this, because it was a conscious choice of mine, only because I knew it would make the show better, and I didn't care who was funny as long as somebody was funny and that the show was funny. So you have hit upon one of the great secret weapons of the Seinfeld series, was that I had no issue with that.

The straight man doesn't get the laughs, but he's setting up the humor. It's Scalia, not the Solicitor General, who deserves credit for that comedy. To say that his contribution was unintentional is to ascribe a ridiculous naivete to him. An honest person � that is, a person not in a lawyer role � answering the question "Why is that not going to happen here?" would describe the story of how one party rammed the Affordable Care Act through Congress, without any buy-in from the other party, and without building any consensus among the people, who were told to quiet down and wait and see that it would ultimately turn out to be good. The people subsequently shifted control of Congress to the party that had zero buy-in. Scalia knew all that when he asked his question. The humor already inhered. It's very dark humor, of course. The Solicitor General � tasked with upholding the work of a party that wielded power ruthlessly and consequently lost it � succeeded in lightening the humor, but that doesn't deserve comedy credit. It deserves lawyer credit.