The all-male feminist support group.

"I just wish there was a way that we could be validated for being such great feminists."

"Suspects in the recent biker brawl in Waco, Texas, only slightly outnumber the 2016 Republican Presidential candidates, leading some voters to have difficulty distinguishing between the two groups, a new poll shows."

Ha ha, very funny, but... just let me say 5 things:

1. Seven... eight... who remembers?... human beings got murdered killed in that Twin Peaks shoot out and no one cares. Should we be a little ashamed of taking murder death so lightly?

2. These people all stand accused of mass murder organized crime, and it's just some kind of meaningless joke:



3. It would be funny if that were animated and they all started looking around at each other "Brady Bunch" style.

4. We're being prodded to think of the numerosity of the GOP field of candidates as absurd. (How will they debate?) I keep seeing GOP-disparagers calling the group a "clown car." What's really going on? I say it's displacement of anxiety over the extreme opposite happening on the other side: only Hillary.

5. What will we get tired of first, the only-ness of Hillary or the overly-ness of the GOP? I've been giving this a lot of thought. It's complicated. Hillary has been trying to avoid too much attention, and if there's no action, maybe attention will be lavished on the GOP and we'll get tired of them as a group. But won't they be attacking her? She can't sit back and hope we don't think about her for the next year. And I don't see the GOP candidates attacking each other. Hillary and her allies can't do very well attacking the GOP candidates. Which ones would she pick on, and why help the GOP thin the crowd? To do so would not only strengthen the remaining group, it would require her to take positions and get specific, making her an easier target.

"I keep wanting to use the phrase, 'I need your help' but it's important to me to be honest."

"I don't need your help at all; I simply want your money to be spent in place of my own."

I have a problem with the "winner level":



There's no apostrophe in the possessive "its." I question the purity of the promised love.

"You can take only one thought with you to the grave, and invariably it is a thought that bugs you..."

"... something that must be thought all the way through to the end before you find your peace. The thought I took was of a man I loved saying, 'You are a joke, and your life is a joke.' It cleaved to my head and my muscles and my bones, until I was nothing but those words. When my life collapsed inward�which is what death is, life collapsing deep into itself�that phrase remained outside the collapsing; it became a thing separate from me. And, because it was separate from me, I could take it with me�it was the only thing I had."

From an excellent New Yorker story by Sheila Heti titled "My Life Is a Joke."

"Sadly, the creator of Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal has died."

"Happily, Ryan Gosling does the best tribute evar," I found out at Metafilter.

Here's the original "Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal" (from a couple years ago):



And here's the tribute:



More detail at "Know Your Meme," including the name of the man who made the original videos, Ryan McHenry, and the cause of death, bone cancer. McHenry died on May 3rd, and "On May 4th, Ryan Gosling launched his first personal Vine, which consisted of himself eating cereal." There aren't many things that are simultaneously so funny, sad, sweet, and internet.

"Let�s say a student who received a C grade on a paper asks you to reread it and change their grade because they 'worked so hard on it.'"

8 professors compose a response directed at the student, including one that begins "Dear C Student" and another that begins "Dear Student Who Must Be Out Of Their Mind" and is signed "Sincerely, Dr. 'I know you didn�t just come to me with this foolishness' Amin."

I don't believe this is really how professors respond to student requests. A polite refusal is all that's really needed. But these are letters written not to real students but for publication, and you might find them funny. Myself, I don't find them funny. It's too much the "punching down" kind of humor that really should be avoided by someone exercising power. A student may be thinking it doesn't hurt to try. Maybe it could work. And it's an institutional problem if students feel that way. Is somebody else raising grades in response to mere begging?

(At my school, teachers aren't allowed to change grades unless there's a computational error. You can't reassess the quality of the exams. There's also a required curve, so the grades all exist in comparison to the grades that other students received in that class. In a system like that, it doesn't make sense to redo your thinking for one exam. You should have to redo them all. And if anyone needed a higher grade, it should probably mean someone else should have to get a lower grade.)

A nurse said: "We all play a game called Interesting Things I Have Found in Obese People�s Rolls of Fat."

"So far I�m sitting in third with a fork, second place is an ICU nurse who found a TV remote, and the winner is an ER nurse who found a tuna fish sandwich."

Quoted in a WaPo article called "Nurses make fun of their dying patients. That�s okay," by Alexandra Robbins, who has a book called, "The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles With the Heroes of the Hospital."

Robbins says:

I learned that some units have a dedicated �butt box� for items retrieved from patients� rectums � glass perfume bottles, an entire apple, etc. � though after Indiana nurses pulled out a G.I. Joe, the real unfortunate hero assumed pride of place in the nurses� station.

Her point is that usually the jokes are about "situations and symptoms"...

But even when patients do become subjects of derogatory humor, we shouldn�t rush to criticize medical professionals for using it. Bioethicist Katie Watson suggests that kind of humor may result when health-care providers feel powerless to heal. �Derisive joking does the unspoken work of reframing physicians as blameless for their inability to help,� she wrote in 2011 in the Hastings Center Report....

Humor has a place in hospitals, even if it�s dark, even if it�s derogatory � as long as it isn�t cruel.... Humor is a way for nurses to empower themselves and to unite with one another, determined and defiant, against disease and injury...

... and rolls of fat.

"Gay Events That I, Marco Rubio, Would Go To."

A comic piece at The New Yorker � #1 on The New Yorker's "most popular" list � that riffs on a WaPo item that reads:

Presidential candidate and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in an interview with Univision�s Jorge Ramos on Wednesday that he would attend a gay wedding of someone he was close to � while qualifying that he wouldn�t condone the union itself.

It's a good comic idea, which is why I and, I assume, many others clicked on it, which is all that is needed to be "popular" for the purposes of climbing an internet "most popular" chart. The execution of the comic idea is another matter. But that's subjective, and it's going to depend on whether you feel empathy for politicians who need to adopt a namby-pamby pose on gay marriage.

I stopped to contemplate the quality of my own humor. Should I say "a namby-pamby pose"? To help decide, I did a Google image search on the phrase "a namby-pamby pose." #1:



My question is answered. The god Serendipity has spoken.

UPDATE: Speaking of gods speaking, no sooner do I publish this post than my doorbell rings. Though I don't normally answer the doorbell, I go to the door. It's 2 men in suits and a little boy. They've got copies of The Watchtower. Here's how I reacted:



Ah! It's such a perfect day today! I believe in The Universe!

"There was the story about a man bringing a gun to an Easter church service � which went off when it got caught on his pants."

"Then we had a guy accidentally shooting his mother-in-law through the wall of her trailer when his target was actually an armadillo ('That bullet couldn�t have taken a more American journey if it had punctured a Kraft single, ricocheted off a Nascar trophy and got lodged in a painting of Elvis and Jesus holding hands at a rodeo,' observed Williams). But neither of these news stories could even come close to the report that succeeded in taking home the 2015 'Mercun Award crown..."

From a WSJ report on "The Daily Show"'s  awards based on the "popular social-media meme #Murica." The WSJ's link on the hashtag goes not to Twitter but to the Urban Dictionary, which defines the term in an openly bigoted manner: "The way un-educated Americans (generally rednecks, hicks, republicans, or very patriotic people) say America" and "The term 'murica' is the way how many people with extremely thick, American accents, pronounce 'America'. The term is used to denote extreme, extreme nationalism and patriotism, but not necessarily facism. It is generally seen as a derogatory yet humorous way to describe most Americans: fat, lazy, gunwielding, war loving, horse riding, saloon fighting, beer drinking, sex wanting or etc."

"Hillary Clinton has followed up the official announcement of her candidacy with a new campaign ad featuring nothing but kittens."

"The sixty-second spot stars an assortment of kittens�tabbies, calicoes, Siamese, and a dozen other breeds�in a variety of adorable vignettes.... Clinton herself appears only in the final seconds of the ad, saying merely, 'Hi. I�m Hillary.'"

"Saturday Night Live" seems to think female teachers having sex with their male students is a big, smirk-worthy joke.

"What free speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must."

"Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They�re allowed to feel pain. Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.... Writing satire is a privilege I�ve never taken lightly. And I�m still trying to get it right."

Says Garry Trudeau.

Madonna does a standup comedy routine... and the jokes are all about dating younger men.

One joke is that, needing a date, she asked her son: "Do you have any friends you could introduce me to?" Her son is 14. She's 56.



It's supposed to be funny � not that it needs to be funny (the joke is that she's doing a standup routine at all) � because we're supposed to think good for you when a woman gets a man (or boy) who is younger.

Or maybe the idea was to make the audience boo and hiss, that it was a Neil Hamburger-type routine. Well, no one seems to have gotten it on that level. You have to sell intentionally, painfully bad. It's not easy.

"Do you have a skeleton already?"/"Is that a trick question?"

Penn Jillette, in a conversation about a skeleton � a second skeleton, outside his body � for his home decorating scheme which includes a nice Scrabble-themed bathroom and the color pink (because he tends not to look at things). Also, he's lost over 100 pounds.

ADDED: The video embed didn't work, so I took it out. You can watch it at the first link.

"We do, however, have a problem with the fact that those who are so quick to condemn Dunham say nothing about these men."

Writes Katie Halper � speaking for herself and her "Morning Jew" co-host Heather Gold � in a piece titled "9 comedy bits Lena Dunham critics need to call anti-semitic," pushing back the criticism of that Lena Dunham humor piece in the New Yorker, "Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz." Halper and Gold have the thesis that the criticism of Dunham comes from sexism, not any serious concern about anti-Semitism, and you can think about that. I'm just absolutely distracted by this sequence from Mel Brooks' "History of the World Part 1," which is a hell of a lot more than a "comedy bit":



I was in awe, saying out loud, several times: "Why have I never seen this before?" Why isn't that more famous? You endlessly hear � it's knee-jerk at the mention of the Spanish Inquisition � about Monty Python's "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition." Why isn't that Mel Brooks song-and-dance more deeply engrained in the culture? Is it because he's Jewish?

Al Franken: "Climate change? It's not real."

"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?

"The Indiana he knew as a kid was completely homophobic. Take my word for it."

Said Meade, upon hearing Letterman's "David Letterman's Top Ten Guys Indiana Governor Mike Pence Looks Like" routine, which begins: "This is not the Indiana I remember as a kid. I lived there for 27 years, and folks were folks, and that�s all there was to it. We all breathed the same air, we were all carbon-based life forms. We didn�t care."



Meade was born in Indiana in 1954 and lived there until 1971. "I don't remember anyone, ever, saying it's okay to be gay or that you should treat gay people the same as anyone else. The only thing I ever heard was disparaging or it was joked about and behind the joking was pretty thinly veiled fear. There were no 'out' gays." Meade called Letterman "delusional" and repeats something I said the other day: "Stop otherizing Indiana."

I'm going to defend Letterman a bit, even though I'm sure Meade is right about  Hoosiers and homosexuality in the 1950s. One thing is, Letterman makes no effort to understand what RFRA actually says and how it is likely to work in practice: "Honestly, I don't know what [Mike Pence] is talking about." He's operating at a higher level of abstraction, where Hoosiers are stereotypically friendly and nice to everybody. That's what he remembers, and that is the Hoosier brand. Ironically, Mike Pence � in his disastrous turn on ABC's "This Week" � relied on the same branding:

Hoosier -- come on. Hoosiers don't believe in discrimination. I mean the way I was raised, in a small town in Southern Indiana, is you're -- you're kind and caring and respectful to everyone. Anybody that's been in Indiana for five minutes knows that Hoosier hospitality is not a slogan, it's a reality. People tell me when I travel around the country, gosh, I went -- I went to your state and people are so nice....

Yeah, you're the nice people... unlike those people in other states. Well, I just have 2 things to say about that: 1. You're otherizing the people of the other states who have to be less nice for it to be noticeable that your people are so nice, 2. Niceness is a superficial quality, and it's a quality that makes it hard to tell whether the seemingly nice person thinks ill of you or not. Those stereotypical Hoosiers might hate your kind. How would you know?

By the way, has David Letterman ever said disparaging things about gay people on his show? All the jokes in there over the years, going back to the "Tonight" show appearances? I think it would be extraordinary if he didn't. Mocking gay people was, of course, absolutely the norm for Johnny Carson, who expected and got endless laughs over men who are � his words � "light in [their] loafers."

AND: The "Guys Indiana Governor Mike Pence Looks Like" routine isn't consistent with an ethic of friendly kindness and equality. You put up a picture of a man and then throw 10 shots at him for the way he looks. Letterman made a point of not even attempting to understand what Pence was talking about. Let's just make fun of how he looks. Letterman was teaching us that it's just fine to have a gut reaction to a person, to reject the stage in human relations where you see things from the other person's point of view, and to mock him for superficial reasons that have no substance at all.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula came up with 2 answers to my question "By the way, has David Letterman ever said disparaging things about gay people on his show?"

1. In 2011, Letterman joked about Rosie O'Donnell: "The woman she is marrying, her fianc�e, was driving... and her car broke down. And guess what happened? Rosie pulls up right behind her in her tow truck." Rosie wondered what motivated him and added: "I don't remember making fun of you when you had sex with all your interns, Dave. I didn't do that. I didn't make fun of your rampant, throbbing heterosexuality, did I Dave?"

2. In 2008, Letterman had a Top 10 list of "things Jim Carrey will always say 'yes' to" including "A Fan Asking for a Hug, Unless He's a Dude" and then a shot Carrey taking a bath with Larry King and Letterman saying "Those guys are so gay!"

"The Daily Show" chooses Trevor Noah, a South African, to replace Jon Stewart.

The NYT observes that Noah is "nonwhite," but that there's a question "why the network did not choose a woman to crack the all-male club of late-night television hosts."

[Noah] grew up in Soweto, the son of a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father, whose union was illegal during the apartheid era. �My mother had to be very clandestine about who my father was,� Mr. Noah said. �He couldn�t be on my birth certificate.�

By the time he started performing stand-up in his 20s, Mr. Noah said he had long been taught that �speaking freely about anything, as a person of color, was considered treason.�

According to the NYT, Michele Ganeless, president of Comedy Central, "said that Comedy Central... drew up 'a shortlist' of possible successors 'and Trevor checked off every box on that list and then some.'" That doesn't make sense. If the "list" is a list of "possible successors," how could one person on that list check off "every box on that list and then some"? Obviously, there's some other list. Presumably, it's a list of things Comedy Central thought would be plus factors. I guess being female wasn't one of them. Ganeless seems to have unwittingly stated that Comedy Central really wasn't hoping to put a woman in the anchor seat. Either that or gushy puffery about Noah caused her to say something she didn't mean to say.

Why is Ganeless president of Comedy Central? Perhaps she was promoted beyond her appropriate level.

Anyway, I'm not sold on Noah. I watched the clip of him that was linked at the beginning of the NYT article � I sat through the Coke-and-Pepsi commercial for "Mixify" � which shows him in a colloquy with Jon Stewart. Noah began with what seems to be the old joke "I just flew in and boy are my arms tired." When the predictable groans ensued, Noah held his arms up in the Ferguson hands-up-don't-shoot position and said:

"No, seriously, I've been holding my arms like this since I got here. I never thought I�d be more afraid of police in America than in South Africa. It kind of makes me a little nostalgic for the old days, back home."

So, get ready for jokes against America told in a not-American accent. I guess, not American was on the Comedy Central checklist of plus factors that Noah checked off (and then some).  Yeah, I know, you don't have to get ready because you don't watch "The Daily Show." I don't either anymore. I used to watch every day. I still record every show, but I can't remember the last time I felt like clicking on the recording. Maybe I got tired of Jon Stewart's incessant yelling in disbelief. How could America be so awful? But does that mean I want to hear Noah's mellifluous murmuring about how awful America is?

I know, I'm old. The show is not intended for me. I saw the commercial for Mixify. Coke and Pepsi's effort to get people to "mix" their soda-drinking with nutritious food was, to me, a ludicrously transparent effort to fend off government regulation, not what they want you to think it is:

#Realtalk: Coke, Dr Pepper and Pepsi understand that balancing your mix of foods, drinks and physical activities can get a little tricky. And since our products can play a part in that equation, we�ve teamed up to help make it easier to find a balanced mix that feels oh so right. That�s where Mixify comes in. It�s like a balance wingman.

Bringing you new combinations to keep your mix fresh and your body right. Like mixing lazy days with something light, following sweaty workouts with whatever you�re craving, and crossing cats with dragons. Because at the end of the day, finding balance keeps you feeling snazzier than the emoji of the dancing lady in red. Balance what you eat and drink with what you do. That�s how you Mixify.

Hashtag Realtalk? A balance wingman? A little tricky? Actually, it's not tricky at all. Don't drink soda. It's not tricky to me, that is, but I take it Coke and Pepsi are trying to trick teach tricks to people who are not me. And maybe those kids will love Trevor Noah.

Norm MacDonald and David Letterman tell their favorite George Miller jokes.