Remember the stories about how comedians could not find ways to make jokes about Obama?

Well, Mitt Romney and his joke writers certainly blew that idea to bits. Every comic who’s laid off Obama should be embarassed.

HT: Instapundit.

A couple who decided to have sex atop an outdoor table at a Florida restaurant–in full view of families dining nearby–avoided criminal charges because witnesses declined Monday night to provide statements to police.

Stiff #1!

The manager of Paddy Murphy’s, an Orlando eatery, summoned cops after he “was notified by several patrons that a couple was having sex on a table in view of minor children,” according to an Orlando Police Department report.

Tom Murphy told officers that he approached the couple early Monday evening and told them to stop. But the man, identified by cops as Jeremie Calo, responded, “She can’t get up at this time.” Calo, 32, was referring to his companion Tiffani Lynn Barganier.

Murphy told police that he directed Calo to “Compose yourself, pay your tab or I’ll call the police.” Calo, however, signed his check “NO” and then scuffled with a restaurant employee when he tried to leave without paying.

Stiff #2!

Murphy and the worker restrained Calo until the arrival of cops, who arrested Calo for defrauding an innkeeper.

But Calo and Barganier dodged charges related to their alleged public lewdness on Paddy Murphy’s patio. “The parents of the young children that observed Calo and Barganier having sex declined to write statements regarding their observations,” noted police. The report does not further detail why the witnesses opted not to provide statements.

It probably wouldn’t have mattered if they’d actually watched.

Maybe they need a nitwit driving sign to warn others.

via Instapundit

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) – It’s a complicated story, but a Thurston County man says he managed to shoot himself in the head with a .22-caliber rifle while fishing for salmon.

A sheriff’s report says the man told deputies he fired a shot into the Deschutes River on Sunday afternoon but the bullet ricocheted off a rock and hit him in the temple. When he scratched the spot with his finger, he says the bullet fell out of his head and into the river.

If you shoot a fish in the water, how do you retrieve it?

Now that we’ve seen what bad officiating looks like, let’s take a moment to appreciate this Adonis in stripes.

Jim Treacher started a Debbie Wasserman Shultz caption contest with this:

“…are in massive debt before they’re even born. Assuming we don’t kill them first, as we celebrated during our convention.”

From the wires:

Women in the civil rights group “Let’s Save Togo” said they will have a week-long sex strike to demand the resignation of President Faure Gnassingbe. The plan for women to withhold sex from their husbands for a week will start tomorrow, said Isabelle Ameganvi, leader of the group’s women’s wing. She said the strike will urge Togo’s men to take action against Gnassingbe. Ameganvi, a lawyer, said her group is following the example of Liberia’s women who used a sex strike in 2003 to campaign for peace.

From a summary of the Aristophenes play:

Lysistrata has planned a meeting between all of the women of Greece to discuss the plan to end the Peloponnesian War. As Lysistrata waits for the women of Sparta, Thebes, and other areas to meet her she curses the weakness of women. Lysistrata plans to ask the women to refuse sex with their husbands until a treaty for peace has been signed.

Earlier this week, signs with the wording “Speed Hump” were placed next to the newly installed speed bumps in the Hartland High School parking lot.

On Thursday morning, the “Speed Hump” signs were taken down, according to Hartland Schools Maintenance [Michigan]  and Operations Coordinator, Patty Glynn.

“The director of operations (George Waldrup) was asked by our superintendent Janet Sifferman, to have the signs taken down,” Glynn said. “We were asked to re-order different signs with different wording. So, yes –it’s not going to have the word “hump” in it.”

Glynn, who explained that the word hump is the correct terminology within the industry for the speed bumps that were installed, said that although there were no specific complaints regarding the signs, it was general consensus among the administration to have them removed and reworded.

“When you’re talking about a high school, its probably not the best choice of word to use,” she said.

Story here.

Hey, he’s not much worse than the NBC yakkers. One of whom advised us that the volunteers at the opening ceremony weren’t paid a thing.

Native German Philip Oltermann in the UK Guardian, tries to explain the German sense of humor.

…On New Year’s Eve 1972, NDR, northern Germany’s regional television channel, screened the sketch at 6pm, and something clicked. In fact, something amazing happened: Germany fell utterly in love with it. People put down their plates of potato salad and left their frankfurters to cool; entire parties huddled around the television set. The following year, each of the regional channels showed Dinner for One at 6pm, and a few showed a repeat four hours later. Since 1963, the sketch has been screened 231 times to German audiences, making it the most repeated show on German television, and, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most popular show in TV history. In 2004, 15.6 million Germans watched it.

[You can watch the sketch referred to below here. The intro is in German, but the rest is English.]

The sketch is called Dinner for One, and it is easily described. The curtain opens on butler James laying a lavish dinner table. The lady of the house, Miss Sophie, wearing an elegant evening dress, descends a flight of stairs, and sits at the head of the table. We soon realise that it is her 90th birthday, and that something is not quite right. “Is everybody here?” Miss Sophie asks. “They’re all here waiting, Miss Sophie, yes,” James says, gesticulating towards the empty seats around the table. “Sir Toby?” Sophie asks. “Sir Toby is sitting here,” James says, patting the back of the chair on Miss Sophie’s right, and continues to assign seats to the imaginary guests named by his mistress: “Admiral von Schneider”, “Mr Pommeroy” and “my very dear friend, Mr Winterbottom”.

The evening continues in this vein. James serves four courses: mulligatawny soup, haddock, chicken and fruit. With each, Miss Sophie requests a different drink: first sherry, then white wine, then champagne, then port. In the absence of any actual people around the table, James impersonates the different guests and toasts the host on their behalf. With each course, James’s walk becomes less stable, his tour around the dining room more haphazard.

Much of the comedy in Dinner for One is slapstick, knockabout stuff: James spills wine, drops food, crashes into furniture and downs the water in the flower vases instead of what’s in the port glasses. But the most memorable comic moment in the sketch is verbal. Before each change of wine, James stops short: “By the way, the same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?” The mistress of the house looks accusingly at her servant: “The same procedure as every year, James.” At the end of the sketch, Miss Sophie decides to retire to her bedroom. James, now completely drunk, offers his arm. For a final time, there is the catchphrase – but this time, the effect is different: “Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?”

“Same procedure as every year, James.”

“Well, I’ll do my very best.”

As he is dragged offstage, James winks at the audience, baring his gappy teeth for a Cheshire-cat grin.

Originally scripted by the variety playwright Lauri Wylie in the 1920s, Dinner for One, also known as The Ninetieth Birthday, used to be a staple in the music-halls of seaside resorts from Blackpool down to Brighton: a very British kind of pleasure. Very British, that is, until German TV show host Peter Frankenfeld and director Heinz Dunkhase watched the sketch at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens in August 1962. Straight after the show, Frankenfeld convinced the two performers – veteran comic Freddie Frinton and 72-year-old May Warden – to record their act for German TV, even though it took the show almost another 10 years to find an audience there.

On New Year’s Eve 1972, NDR, northern Germany’s regional television channel, screened the sketch at 6pm, and something clicked. In fact, something amazing happened: Germany fell utterly in love with it. People put down their plates of potato salad and left their frankfurters to cool; entire parties huddled around the television set. The following year, each of the regional channels showed Dinner for One at 6pm, and a few showed a repeat four hours later. Since 1963, the sketch has been screened 231 times to German audiences, making it the most repeated show on German television, and, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most popular show in TV history. In 2004, 15.6 million Germans watched it.

I grew up in the north of Germany and know Dinner for One practically by heart. The first time I watched it I was five – it must have been either the first New Year’s Eve that I was allowed to stay up late, or the first time I actually had the stamina to. Through my teens, the sketch stayed with me and continued to reveal new layers of interest: when puberty stirred, the double entendre of the line “Same procedure as every year” mystified me. “I’ll do my very best.” Best what? He didn’t mean that, did he? They’re so … old. And if so, where? And how? And for how long? The ambiguity drove me insane. Perhaps the fact that Dinner for One dealt in such universal taboo subjects as sex between the elderly accounted for some of its cult status. But then why was the sketch so particularly popular in Germany?

One reason might be that there is so little talking in the film. By wooing the audience for laughs with physical gestures rather than words, the sketch managed to tap into a specifically German distrust of language – the same mindset that had made it the natural home of silent cinema in the 1920s.

Spike Milligan famously said that “the German sense of humour is no laughing matter”, and it will take time to shift that cliche: a poll last year revealed the Germans are still considered the unfunniest nation in the world. Of course, it’s not as simple as that: it’s just that German comedy speaks its own language. Even today, most comedy in Germany is generally more physical and knockabout than in Britain, though this is not to say that it is all as crude and basic as a Benny Hill sketch.

I was reared on a wide range of comic acts: at one end of the spectrum was Otto Waalkes, a modern version of the circus clown, with oversized dungarees, a bald pate, a trademark bunny-hop walk and goofy laughter. At the other end was the late Vicco von Bülow, better known as Loriot: a more subtle act, whose sketches were usually set in the socially awkward realm of the upper middle class, a world of fine dining, book clubs and boardroom meetings. And yet the core of Loriot’s act was essentially physical. One of the most popular Loriot sketches is reminiscent of Dinner for One: a couple are at a table in a restaurant, eating soup; the man noticeably nervous. As he wipes his mouth with his napkin, a noodle gets stuck on his chin. The woman tries to point this out, but the man interrupts her. For the rest of the sketch, the rogue noodle travels from his chin to his finger to his forehead to his earlobe. The comic effect is heightened by the fact that the man is trying to have a serious conversation about their relationship, but the popularity of the sketch is essentially all down to the noodle.

German humour’s reliance on the physical is not just apparent on television, but also in the way Germans act on a day-to-day basis. After or before they have made a joke, many Germans will make a physical gesture to signpost their intention: sometimes just an expressively raised eyebrow, sometimes something more emphatic. Not for nothing are jokes also known as Schenkelklopfer, “thigh-slappers”.

The decorum of English joking couldn’t be more different. When I first moved to London in 1997, and the boys at my school made jokes, there was nothing in their body language to demonstrate it – no funny voice, no grimacing, no slapping of thighs. Particularly in my first year, I was caught out innumerable times by this. There was the vocabulary test that my classmates had warned me about that never happened, the boy who said his father was the prime minister who wasn’t, the teacher who said he had been drafted into the Oxford and Cambridge boat race at the last minute who hadn’t. They had all told blatant lies without raising an eyebrow. Deadpan joke-telling seemed to come from the same mentality as the British art of understatement: the point was that you would by all means avoid making an outward show of what was going on inside your head…

Via my son, who often hears me complain about this clueless trend.

So it wouldn’t get stoned.

That’s Jim Treacher’s great line.

Question: What’s the sound of David Axelrod’s weekend getting ruined?

Alex Pappas reports:

A new book on Barack Obama reveals fresh details about the president’s youthful days as an avid smoker of marijuana — a time when he and his fellow weed smokers called themselves the “Choom Gang.”

Among the highlights:

— Obama was known for his interceptions. This is the act of joining a circle of people passing around a joint, taking a hit and yelling, “Intercepted!”

— Obama and his friends at the Punahou School in Hawaii called themselves the “Choom Gang” — choom means smoking weed — and drove around in a Volkswagen bus called the “Choomwagon.”

— Obama and his crew enjoyed what they called “roof hits,” smoking pot inside a car with all the windows rolled up to maximize the amount of smoke they inhaled.

Why did Obama put his dog on the roof of the car? So it wouldn’t get stoned.

Speaking only for myself, I’m fine with having a president who used to get blazed out of his mind. It’s just funny that the same people who are scrambling to defend him were, shall we say, somewhat less accepting of Bush’s youthful indiscretions.

Protein Wisdom

Obama taking a cue from Joe “Middle Class” Biden.

Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world …

Has Obama spent one day in the private sector? Has he gotten one thing on his own merit rather than Obama-as-articulate-clean-symbol-white-leftliberals-could-feel-good-about-grooming?

h/t Jim Geraghty who points out:

It would probably be rude of me to think about Michelle Obama’s work, where her salary jumped from $121,910 to $316,962 per year after her husband became a U.S. senator, a job that was strangely left unfilled after she stepped down to focus on her husband’s campaign.

Such positions are quite challenging to find in the… real world.

Scary thought: Obama might really think he’s lived in the real world.

Politically incorrect, but funny. Probably NSFW.

This could be episode #1 of “BMI: Canada”

A Canadian woman called the emergency services after mistaking her neighbour’s noisy toilet efforts for a violent disturbance.

The woman, of Victoria in British Columbia, was worried her neighbour was in trouble after hearing a lengthy bout of loud yelling and shouting.

She heard the noises coming from the man’s basement at about 5am and dialled 911, reports The Province.

Deputy police chief John Ducker said officers rushed to the scene to check on the unidentified man’s well-being.

After banging on the door of the apartment for several minutes, the unharmed man finally answered the door.

“When questioned about the amount of noise he was making, the man explained that he had been essentially on the toilet having his morning constitutional but he was done now,” explained deputy chief Ducker.

“The officers asked him to try to keep the noise down in such future endeavours and he said he would do his best.”

Medium Channels The Spirits Of Old Acquaintances For Awkward Small Talk

…The dinner was a good idea at its inception back in 1920. After all, we Americans rather like the idea that our presidents aren’t royalty, and we take pride in the fact that we are allowed to poke fun at them (I don’t recall many Castro roasts).

But maybe it’s the growing mean-spiritedness of contemporary humor, or maybe it’s the nature of the problems facing the country and the world, but the whole thing comes off as sort of—if you’ll pardon a technical term—icky. Besides which, we don’t need these dinners to see the “lighter side” of our presidents.

Between the tweeting and the talk shows, there’s no shortage of opportunities for our leaders to show us just how funny they are. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind having more chances to see how serious they are.

…then learn to disco.

HT: American Digest

Profanity warning.

Yes, this is the Shakespearean version of The Big Lebowski in which The Dude becomes The Knave.

Get it here, as a PDF.

The Knave abides.

WALTER
In sooth, then, faithful friend, this was a rug of value? Thou wouldst call it not a rug
among ordinary rugs, but a rug of purpose? A star in a firmament, in step with the fashion
alike to the Whitsun morris-dance? A worthy rug, a rug of consequence, sir?

THE KNAVE
It was of consequence, I should think; verily, it tied the room together, gather’d its
qualities as the sweet lovers’ spring grass doth the morning dew or the rough scythe the
first of autumn harvests. It sat between the four sides of the room, making substance of a
square, respecting each wall in equal harmony, in geometer’s cap; a great reckoning in a
little room. Verily, it transform’d the room from the space between four walls presented,
to the harbour of a man’s monarchy.

Doesn’t 3G stand for triple the garlic?

Today’s top headlines on Drudge:

Defenders of Bill Maher (including himself) claim that his vile insults differ from Rush Limbaugh’s because he’s a comedian. Somehow, being a comedian is different than a radio host making a satirical point (clumsily, alas).

Says who and why?

Do comedians such as Maher serve the public good in some special way, like court jesters criticizing the king via humor?

Hardly. (True even without Maher’s $1 million contribution to the prez.)

Maher takes jibes at Sarah Palin before an audience prepared to assume she’s an idiot and to accept that crudity equals audacity. No, Maher preaches to his motley choir, no guts required.

And lest anyone forget, Maher’s jibes at Palin served the political interests of the Democrat party, which feared her political gifts.

Comedian Collin Quinn in 2003 observed that comedians doing raunchy sex jokes and profanity  fancied themselves cutting edge. But the real cutting edge, the one topic only gutsy comedians would go near was race.

Black comedians routinely make racists jokes, but are immune to criticism because they are part of a victim class. One could interpret this as patronizing.

Returning to Maher’s comedian’s claim of immunity, would he dare tell this racist joke?

One time, there was a black family of four. They heard about this river, and if you swim to the other side of it, you turn white. So the Dad swims across and turns white, then the Mom, then the sister. When the youngest child, the brother starts to swim across, he is taken away by the current. The sister says, “Daddy,Tyrone is getting swept away by the current!” And the Dad said, “Screw that nigger.”

No, he wouldn’t dare. (And he probably wouldn’t tell it anyway because he’d find it distasteful.)

But if he couldn’t tell that joke, why can he spew uglier comments about Sarah Palin? Why doesn’t the comedians’ immunity apply here as well?

By the way, the butt of the racist joke is white people, not blacks.