Stop, stop! You're killing us!

Vanity Fair’s June issue [no link yet] has Michael Wolff castigating liberals for being “achingly serious” while the folks across the aisle are just cracking us up with the likes of Ann Coulter ("facile, funny, irreverent, eccentric, jaunty, pithy”) and Roger Ailes ("sly, charming, sometimes farfetched, and irresistibly cynical”).

Gosh, that is a problem. Not only are we out of power, fighting cryptofascists with one hand and lunatic televangelists with the other while trying to get the media to do their job and report how the president lied his way into Iraq… we’re just not funny! If only we had the wits to advocate murdering journalists, assassinating a sitting president, mocking triple amputees, and attacking Republicans with baseball bats. Maybe we’d be in power right now!

Fellow VF writer James Wolcott ruefully agrees that libruls just aren’t as funny as, say, Zell Miller, Tom DeLay, James Dobson, and the like. And this has been going on some time, he adds:

I can remember what the media pundits were saying about Martin Luther King in the Sixties back when they were on their tricycles. If only the Negro would lighten up some, they lamented, and open his sermons with a few jokes, this whole civil-rights thing would be easier for people to accept. He keeps appealing to our consciences, and where's the entertainment in that? Same thing with the anti Vietnam movement. Those placards with photos of napalmed Vietnamese children were such a bringdown, they kind of took the fun out of opposing an illegal, immoral war.

So, friends, let’s all try to be hilarious next week. To get in the proper mood, try this column by the incomparable Cindy Sheehan, founder of Gold Star Mothers for Peace. She’ll really get you going.