What a Joke

What Kerry needed was a little professional help

As a civic-minded American, you probably learned an important lesson from the negativity-soiled election season that just ended. The lesson was clear, wasn't it?

I'm thinking in particular of the fabulous John Kerry incident, where the former presidential candidate appeared to inform a college audience that the American troops in Iraq were slackers, dropouts and idiots. A careful examination of what he said and how he said it reveals that Kerry was not being elitist, unpatriotic or callous. It was far worse. He was doing lousy stand-up.

That's the lesson: Leave humor to the professionals.

Remember the "joke"? Talking about education, Kerry said, "If you make the most of it and study hard, do your homework, make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." What he meant to say was along the lines of ". . . if you don't, you end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."

Studying the video, you could almost see the flop sweat as Kerry was trying to lurch and stagger his way to the end of that sentence. He looks down at his notes. No help there. Maybe he lost his place. So he looks up, panic in his eyes, and delivers that final phrase -- his punch line, his payload! It landed with a nauseating splat, like a pancreas hitting the operating room floor.

The man is as strait-laced as a whalebone corset, as rigid as Formica. His business is politics. He should never be anywhere near a joke.

Example:

Actual Jerry Seinfeld joke-- The problem with mall garages is that everything looks the same. They try to differentiate between levels: different colors, different numbers, different letters. What they need to do is name the levels like, "Your Mother's a Whore." You would remember that. You would go: "No, we're not. We're in 'My Father's an Abusive Alcoholic.'"

The same Jerry Seinfeld joke, as would be told by John Kerry-- The problem with mall garages is that your mother's a whore.

Of course, the instant that Kerry's speech became public, and it was evident that he had been guilty of doofusry but not callousness, everyone backed off, even his political adversaries, in the spirit of decency and fair play. This occurred on the planet Nice, a parallel universe that shares Earth's orbit but is always on the other side of the sun, so we don't know it's there.

Here on Earth, however, Kerry's savage, unprovoked attack on the intelligence and competence of the troops was officially deplored by hundreds of Republicans who had apparently injected turkey baster-size doses of Botox, to keep a straight face.

What is the penalty for not leaving humor to the pros? Death. Kerry is dead! The day before, he was exploring his chances for a 2008 presidential bid. If the speech was a trial balloon, it was filled with cow methane.