Make 'Em Laugh, or Die Trying

These are dark days for comedy. Jerry Seinfeld and his merry band are no longer on TV, replaced by implausible sitcoms full of cheap one-liners that are barely audible over the incessant laugh tracks. The worst offenders are black sitcoms, which portray just about every male character as an idiot and every female character as a know-it-all, sass-talking whale. Where is the NAACP when you need it most?

Then there's that annoying Kathy Griffin who is shoved in our faces and down our throats at every turn; one wonders how she ever got that first callback. I stumbled upon one of her solo shows the other night, and was mouth-hanging-open appalled. One long segment of her act was a description of a time she ate some marijuana brownies and got reeeeeeeaaaaalllly stoned. We heard just how many brownies she ate and just how stoned she got, including what she thought she heard and what she thought she saw and how she laughed uncontrollably for seven minutes over nothing. Perhaps she was listening to a recording of her own act.

So it's no surprise that The Onion, that wacky fake-news website that passes for satire, came forth with the headline that caused such a stir yesterday: "BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building." Ha ha, what a riot. That one was followed by more reports of children being held hostage inside the building. Ha ha, even funnier! Many people, most especially Washingtonians, who saw those reports on Twitter thought it was true, and panic ensued, causing the pranksters over at The Onion to scratch their heads and wonder why everyone couldn't tell it was a joke.

Here's a clue: jokes make you laugh, it's that simple. Like, a woman goes into a bar with a pig under her arm. The bartender asks, "Say, where'd you get that ugly dog?" The woman says, "It's not a dog, it's a pig." The bartender says, "I was talking to the pig." Much funnier than "witnesses reporting screams and gunfire inside the Capitol," don't you agree?