Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Not as funny as we think

We often ridicule the unsophisticated conservatives, and rightly so, for their inability to understand humor. Take the current popular joke making the rounds:

Knock Knock. Who’s there? I’m a stupid ugly bitch who wants to destroy our great nation and install Satan on the throne of heaven. Honey, Hilary Clinton’s at the door again.Tell her to go away, ha ha.

Numerous valid scientific studies indicate that the typical conservative “brain” lacks the ability to find humor in much of anything more sophisticated than that, genitalia, farts, belches, or pratfalls. Many scientists even speculate that the conservative’s evolutionary purpose is to be the butt of jokes, especially considering that the rest of their behavior is so counterproductive to the survival of our species.

Personally, I think that the scientists who claim that conservative’s inability to appreciate sophisticated humor is an evolutionary advantage are just plain whacky. Chuckling believes that there are sophisticated political operatives out there who take advantage of conservative’s evolutionary stuntedness demonstrating that it is anything but an evolutionary advantage. I am on a mailing list that specializes in conservative humor and see the dark side of this phenomena. Take the following for example:
John the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called "pullets", and ten roosters, whose job it was to fertilize the eggs (for you city folks).

The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time, so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters.

Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.

The farmer's favorite rooster was old Butch, and a very fine specimen he was, too. But on this particular morning, John noticed old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all! John went to investigate.

The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover. But to Farmer John's amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He would sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result? The judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well.

Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making: Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention.........

It is a conservative joke in that its content is about animals having sex, but its purpose is propagandistic. Government just wants to screw you, so you better vote for those who hate government. Of course I could be wrong in this particular instance, but there is a lot of this kind of writing going around conservative mailing lists that never makes it into the mainstream, even the blogs. It’s passed off as homespun humor and/or wisdom, but these things are not written by wise old farmers, upstanding churchgoers, or heroic housewives in aprons and oven mitts. More likely, they are produced by a sophisticated political organization whose purpose is to keep the morons stupid. And they are doing their part. Much more than most anyone suspects.