I got a rather nasty comment on my last post (not you Josh, yours was cool) that made me come to the sad realization that some people simply do not know how to take a joke. For this reason, I have decided to devote this post entirely to jokes. There will be no politics, no sarcastic outrage, only comedy. And not comedy in the sense of humorous anecdotes or satire, just old fashioned cheesy jokes. So, without further ado, here are a few examples of my take on classic joke formats. You may have heard some of them if you have hung around me recently, but others will be new and undoubtedly hilarious. Enjoy! Share them with your friends!
I will start off with a classic "what do you call" joke. I actually made this up a couple of years ago, but I still find it hilarious. You will too:
Question: What do you call two forwards on the USSR national soccer team? Answer: A Pair-A-Strike-ahs! (get it, like Perestroika, the Soviet economic plan under Gorbachev)
Here are a few good "guy walks into a bar" jokes I made up recently. The "guy walks into a bar" joke is a classic. What's that guy doing in that bar? I bet some crazy hijinks are afoot:
A guy walks into a bar, sits down, says to the bartender, "I'll have a beer." The bartender says, "What kind do you want?" The guy says, "Oh, I don't care, surprise me." So then the bartender pours him a beer and hands it to him. The guy sits there and takes a few sips and then looks down towards the end of the bar and sees a guy wearing a gray suit with an American flag lapel pin and a red tie. The guy thinks to himself, "Oh my god, that's George W. Bush!" So then the guy gets really excited and he asks the bartender, "Hey bartender, is that Bush?" Bartender says, "No, it's a Coors."
This one is a variation on the previous joke for those of you who are more into hard alcohol:
A guy walks into a bar, sits down, says to the bartender, "Give me a rum and coke." So the bartender mixes the drink and hands it to him. The guy pays the bartender, takes a few sips, and then looks down towards the end of the bar and thinks he sees William Shatner. So then he gets really excited and asks the bartender, "Hey bartender, is that Captain Kirk?" Bartender says, "No, it's Captain Morgan."
And then, here is a good old fashion historical pun-based "guy walks into a bar" joke:
John Sutter walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out of here, we don't serve miners!" (Get it, like "minors." Hilarious. However, though John Sutter owned Sutter's Mill, where gold was first found during California's gold rush, I am not sure of how much mining he actually did personally. This joke would obviously work better with someone who was an actual miner, but I could not think of anyone else famous enough. I suppose you could say, "Derek Zoolander's dad walks into a bar," that would work as well, but may require more explanation.)
Then there's this one, which is a long but effective Airplane joke. The airplane joke, though not a format of its own, is a very common subject matter of the classic annoy-your-friends joke. Sometimes you have to say you are on the plane with the guy for the joke to work. This one can go either way:
So a guy gets on an airplane, puts his luggage in the overhead compartment, sits down, puts on his seatbelt and kind of zones out for a while. All the regular airplane stuff happens; the flight attendant gives the safety demonstration, points out the exits on each side of the plane, and then everything settles down and the plane starts getting ready for take off. The plane taxis down the runway, takes off, and starts lifting off the ground higher and higher until it reaches cruising altitude. Then the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign and the flight attendant starts coming around the cabin for drink orders. She goes up the row one by one until she finally gets to the guy and she asks, "What can I get you to drink?" The guy thinks about it for a while and says, "You know, I would really like a cup of coffee, can you give me a cup of coffee?" The flight attendant says, "I'm sorry sir, can't do that, we only have ground coffee."
Ha ha ha. Well those certainly were funny. Feel free to use them as much as you like.
The interesting thing that I have found about jokes is that they seem to be more effective the more drawn out you make them. Take that last joke, you could just skip from the guy getting on the airplane to the punch-line, but then there is no buildup and less of a payoff. A spoken joke is like a murder mystery, but instead of finding out who the killer is at the end you get a crappy pun. There needs to be time for the audience to think they know what is going on before you pull the rug out from under them and tell them it was Kevin Spacey the whole time (oh shit, did I ruin that for someone?). This is especially important in jokes like my airplane joke. This isn't necessarily that funny, but after the long setup people almost trick themselves into laughing to convince themselves that their time has not been wasted.
Anyway, those are my jokes, use them at your own risk. I think this is an interesting experiment because you always hear jokes like these but you never know where they come from. But for these, you know exactly where they came from, they came 100% from my comedic genius. So, spread them around and with any luck I will be sitting in a bar someday and I will overhear someone saying "No, it's a Coors," to the response of half-hearted chuckles and annoyed groans. And then I will know my gift to the world is complete.
When will the political blogs stop? When I damn well feel like it.
This post will be somewhat about the election but also about the American society in general and my thoughts on our values and ideals. By now you have undoubtedly heard of all the crap coming out from various voices of the Republican Party talking about “anti-American” places or individuals in our country. First Sarah Palin gave that comment about the “pro-American” parts of the country and then there was that neo-McCarthyist statement by congresswoman Michele Bachmann on Hardball the other night. I started this post a few days ago, so by now Jon Stewart has already outwitted me on the subject numerous times, but I had this sitting around on my computer, and really this blog is more about my own frustrations and need to produce something constructive than actually serving as a relevant news source, so I thought I would post it anyway.
Needless to say, it is getting pretty ugly out there with the continuous baseless smears (or “calumny” as Kaplan GRE prep has taught me). So, in this atmosphere of hate mongering and political poop flinging, I have decided to throw some shit of my own. Here are two contributions I would like to add to the political discussion.
1. John McCain is a Communist
Sound like an outrageous claim? Well it probably is. But I see this accusation as having much more of a factual base than any of the smears being thrown at Barack Obama these days. Hopefully I will be able to convince you in the next few paragraphs.
Ever since Wednesday’s debate and all the Joe the Plumber bullshit, John McCain has been speaking out against Barack Obama’s tax policy as “socialist.” Now I was under the impression that the enactment of the 16th Amendment in 1913 stated fairly clearly that taxing income is in fact an American ideal and has allowed for us to pay for things we hold dear to our way of life, like roads, schools, preemptive wars, and 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailouts. But that is neither here nor there. As you may have guessed, my ideals are fairly leftist and I do not see anything inherently wrong with certain aspects of socialism. In fact, the welfare state system that has provided much of Western Europe with beneficial government-run social welfare programs can be considered a type of socialism, and I believe that despite recent globalization problems, these programs have run fairly successfully and are even seen as essential rights by many Europeans. So even if Barack Obama’s policies were somewhat socialistic I would not really care. However, I do believe that this point attempted by the McCain campaign is fallacious (as is the bulk of the campaign in general). In fact, as stated in this recent article of the Chicago Tribune, even socialists themselves do not see Obama’s policies as resembling socialism. In my opinion, if anyone is to be accused of being socialist or communist I believe it should be John McCain himself.
And now I will tell you why this makes sense. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the works of Karl Marx will know that the execution of the communist utopia requires first a worsening of class divisions towards a breaking point, what Marx called the “immiseration of the proletariat.” At the point where the pressures of capitalism have driven down wages to a level where the worker is no longer able to support himself and his family on the money he earns as an industrial laborer, the proletarian class then gains a “class consciousness,” seizes the means of production, and initiates a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” I am no expert on Karl Marx, but my brief exposure to his theories has given me this basic understanding of the Marxist historical model.
Taking into account the above-stated Marxist model, it is my belief that it is not Barack Obama but John McCain who will do more to initiate a communist revolution in the United States. Whereas Obama looks to give tax breaks to the lower and middle classes to lessen the gap between rich and poor in the United States, McCain’s tax cuts for corporations seem to continue on the same lines of George W. Bush in increasing this gap. If this gap continues to widen, in following the Marxist model, we will see a development of class-consciousness by the proletariat and a seizure of the means of production, initiating the first steps of the communist revolution. Essentially, in the traditional Marxist understanding, the revolutions of Lenin and Mao were premature, trying to create a communist society before the true immiseration of the proletariat. To achieve the sort of revolution that Marx was talking about, a society needs to have sufficiently shitty conditions that the mass of people would see no other way but to overthrow the current conditions and institute a classless society. It is my belief that this revolution will be much better served by four more years of war and economic destruction by a McCain presidency.
So, perhaps McCain is not directly a communist, but his policies do more readily prepare for the revolution of the proletariat than do Barack Obama’s. It’s like mixing up flour, eggs, butter, and milk in a big mixing bowl and leaving it next to the stove, and then another guy comes along and says, “Oh sweet, pancake batter! It’s flapjack time!” I mean, technically you didn’t make the flapjacks but you created the conditions in which flapjacks could be made. So, my point is that if I were a true Marxist (and by this I mean not the Leninist vanguard party model, but the longer immiseration-style Marxism) I would say John McCain is the way to go for bringing about the revolution. Because I have clearly expressed a preference for Barack Obama you can go ahead and assume I am not a communist (and feel free to report that message to Joe McCarthy or Sarah Palin if they come asking about me).
2. Why should I care about pro-Americanism or Bill Ayers?
Seriously, I think this is a question that needs to be raised. Now don’t get me wrong, I love America. I am all for the American dream and I feel that the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution did great things for the development of modern democratic ideals. But, I see no need to adopt the rhetoric that “America is the best country in the world.” I mean, to rationally dissect this statement leads to the obvious question, how does one measure what is the “best country”? And while we are at it, what is the second best country? Why don’t we just rank all the countries in order of best to worst and then go from the bottom wiping out all the worst countries until it’s just us left? OK, I realize this point hits a little too close to home as it is essentially the text of the Bush Doctrine. What I’m trying to say is that simply asserting over and over again that the United States is the best country in the world takes away our ability to look rationally at the situation and decide what we need to do to improve, what could make us a better country.
This is why I don’t understand when people get all up in arms about things like Michelle Obama saying that this is the first time in her adult life she remembers being proud of her country. That to me is a logical, well-reasoned statement. I mean for one to say that they are proud of the policies of the United States in the last four years, or even the last eight years excluding the brief coming together period after 9/11, is to me complete lunacy. Nearly everyone (even John McCain since the end of the primaries) believes that we are worse off now than eight years ago, so why not be able to state it outright rather than doing this political pussy footing bullshit where we talk about how great America is while simultaneously watching it fall apart? I think we should be able to have a reasoned discussion and say, “the United States is a pretty good country, but it has had some slip-ups and we need to do things to make it better.” Simply asserting that we love our country is not going to help us fix anything.
Continuing on this thread of liberals being "anti-American," I would like to put in my thoughts about this Bill Ayers crap that has been going on for the past few weeks. I realize that you are all probably sick of this as I am myself, but I want to raise a few points on this.
First of all, I don’t really see the point that the McCain campaign is trying to make by bringing this up. They are obviously not saying that Barack Obama led any of the Weather Underground bombings, so why is it relevant at all? I mean the guy is not some fugitive on the loose that Obama is harboring in his house; he is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There was an investigation for his crimes, he was pardoned, now he is supposed to be a normal citizen of the United States. What the McCain campaign is doing is essentially double jeopardy, which is supposed to be illegal in this country.
Secondly, I’m annoyed with the McCain campaign and the mainstream media as well, for never bothering to explain what it is that Bill Ayers actually did. The McCain campaign just keeps saying, “domestic terrorist Bill Ayers,” which leads the public who may be too young or not remember the exact facts of 1969-1975 to think up whatever wild ideas they want to about Bill Ayers. Furthermore, the fliers and robocalls distributed by the McCain campaign, state that Ayers was involved in a campaign of terrorism and that he “killed American citizens.” Well technically, this is true. Technically. I have not studied the subject in depth, but as far as my brief research has told me, the only citizens that the Weather Underground killed were other members of the Weather Underground. In March 1970, a bomb the group was constructing in their Greenwich Village safe house went off prematurely and killed Weather Underground members Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins. Though these individuals were American citizens and it must have been a tragic event for their friends and families, to say that the Weather Underground killed American citizens is not exactly telling an accurate depiction of the truth. And after the Greenwich Village incident, the group announced each of their attacks ahead of time, specifically to avoid civilian casualties. It may seem like a moot point, but seeing that McCain has lied about so many other aspects of his campaign I don’t see why he would do it on this point, where it is not even necessary. In this context, saying that Bill Ayers’s organization killed American citizens is kind of like in Star Wars when Obi Wan tells Luke that Darth Vader killed his father. I mean, he can argue that it is true and you kind of agree with him, but underneath you are still thinking, “you tricky bastard Obi Wan.” It seems like an argument that is almost as specious as my “John McCain is Communist” claim (see above). Having said this, if anyone knows of any other individuals killed by Weather Underground attacks please let me know.
So there is my take on the political happenings of the week. Reading all the election news just makes me angry and yet I cannot look away. I hate it and love it at the same time.
I realize that probably 95% of my readership is already on the Obama side, so my liberal rantings do not serve much of a purpose, but I hope what I say is at least entertaining. And I know what you are thinking, “95%? How can that figure be accurate with no more than 10 people actually reading this blog?” But ah, dear reader, you are forgetting about the Half-Cat Man. His man side is staunchly Obama, but the cat side has decided to support McCain, citing the following video as proof that liberals are pro-canine and therefore do not represent his core values.
