Real Americans Don't Get 'Jokes'
This last weekend, comedian and writer Al Franken won the Democratic-Farmer Labor party nomination for Senator from Minnesota. He'll face incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in November. It will be an odd and embarrassing race for everyone, but mostly for Minnesota. On his own merits, Franken can't win. But Coleman is a scumbag and preening moron almost as "out of touch" with his constituents as the former SNL performer. So naturally Coleman is playing his trump card already: Minnesotans are old fools incapable of understanding irony. Which is why they've accused the dude who wrote Stuart Saves His Family of writing "porn," and why Franken is now only telling jokes off the record.
At a gathering of Democratic activists last week, the author, one-time liberal radio show host and former star of the late-night sketch comedy program "Saturday Night Live" swapped quips with supporters — after ensuring a reporter would not write them down.
Voters do hate humor. It's been proven by science! And by science we mean various speculative posts we've written on John McCain and others.
Of course the Minnesota/Rest-of-nation divide is mirrored by the Minneapolis/rest-of-state divide so Franken will really have to up the pandering quite a bit and probably eliminate all non-Readers Digest-approved humor from his repertoire if we wants to take back the state.
The saddest thing here is that we much prefer Al Franken the humorist (back when he was funny!) to Al Franken the Clintonian moderate-Dem politician. But whatever, if we never have to see Norm Coleman's capped shit-eating grin again we won't begrudge Al the seat.
