Here is something I learned very early in life, and I learned it while I was winning prestigious debate tournaments where I won them by in no way attempting to be correct on anything.
“It’s been true since I studied and didn’t care for Socrates.
Proving that someone you disagree with is stupid doesn’t prove that you are right.”
To win debate tournaments you must take both sides of often the same issue and just win. To do that means that you can’t really do it by voicing an opinion you believe to be most correct or honest. That seems disingenuous, but was the nature of the event. You may have won, you may have learned, or you may have done neither.
Now similarly, I just want to win, but I mean it genuinely, and I think winning is very important right now.
I mostly wanted and perhaps most had the ability to be a comedian. I liked a lot of them. Some, like Jack Benny, never made a single political joke in their lives. Jack Benny just joked that he was stingy and selfish, but in real life, he was very generous and a great person.
But at some point, I wanted to be most like Lenny Bruce or the Smothers Brothers.
Whether you can listen to Lenny Bruce now and laugh is complex, but the idea was that he sort of wanted to save the world, spoke the truth, and died a martyr.
I have tons of Smothers Brothers albums that are filled with pure silliness that are hysterical and have zero political content. The laughs all come from Tommy Smothers being silly.
Tommy Smothers could be very silly. In real life, he was very serious and political. He is the only other one playing guitar with John Lennon during the filmed recording of “Give Peace a Chance.”
His very political and excellent television show was the most popular on television and was censored and taken off of television. I think that whole experience was frustrating and soul-crushing for him, but it might have been worth it.
It produced many geniuses. The most famous is Steve Martin. Steve Martin can be very serious, but most of his work is pure silliness.
Right now the only thing that I think this country can agree on is that the country is in a state of complete civil war of some kind over Donald Trump.
Maybe, I take that too seriously. I don’t think that is the case.
A very clear and convincing argument can be made that the only reason Donald Trump is president is because of comedians. Specifically, Seth Myers and President Barack Obama hammering him to many laughs at a very famous dinner meant to be a salute to the healing and importance of political comedy.
Trump’s presidency has a been a huge boon for comedians. I don’t know how coal or steelworkers are doing, but comedians of all stripe are making a fortune off the Trump presidency.
Personally, I think the comedians I watch are funnier and better at tearing down the issues and showing the truth than the people who support the guy I have always despised. I thought at one time that was a good thing.
Now it appears that everyone is just laughing with their own side and not doing anything.
Sasha Baron Cohen asked Joe Arpaio on film if he would let Donald Trump blow him and Arpaio said yes. That can be very funny, but it no longer is. Trump pardoned Arpaio and would like nothing more than Arpaio having even more power than he once did. It scares the hell out of me that anyone that ever had any power would answer that question at all, much less answer “yes.”
Even scarier to me is that Trump hasn’t just pardoned Arpaio, he has pardoned others even worse and is willing to pardon anyone that can help him for any reason.
If he is as terrible as I believe, that is not at all funny.
John Oliver just lambasted Rudy Giuliani for saying on Meet the Press that “Truth isn’t truth.” In every way, John Oliver told the truth and slayed last night.
Oliver’s final implication was that Trump would be behind bars someday, but no one alive knows better than Rudy Giuliani that the way to take down huge criminals is to get their henchmen to flip on them. That’s how he made his name.
That is exactly what Robert Mueller is trying to do to Trump, but it can’t work if Trump just pardons everyone Mueller puts in jail. Trump even believes that he can pardon himself.
If that is true our Constitutional Republic is over and he becomes our first dictator, which he has already said and always shown he would love to be.
George Washington could have been a dictator, the point of everyone learning about him as quickly as possible as a child was that he purposefully chose not to do so.
People I agree with send me supposedly funny things like memes and videos that are meant to be funny and laughed at, and then perhaps even acted on. Some of them are 100% false.
There is no productive point in laughing at something 100% false unless it is purely meant to be silly.
There is also no longer a doubt that people on the other side care very little about the truth, which is why I thought and Oliver perhaps thinks that we must care about the truth. Often all we are doing is laughing and feeling superior about something that is no laughing matter.
The other side though is doing nothing, but laughing too. James Woods just posted this, and it is 100% true, and they are all laughing and using it to discredit any opposal of Trump. Al Sharpton did go on MSNBC and pay respect to Aretha Franklin singing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” by spelling it “respict.”
“Uh….” pic.twitter.com/3hSxklfXbi
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 20, 2018
Trump just tweeted that he is being persecuted like a victim of Joseph McCarthy and that people should learn about McCarthyism.
I know all about McCarthyism.
Robert F. Kennedy was very high up on his ladder and loved Joseph McCarthy, but he broke with him and took him down because his number one lawyer was Roy Cohn, and he felt Roy Cohn to be totally evil.
James Woods played Roy Cohn in a film, and if you Google “Donald Trump mentor” all of the search results will tell you that Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s mentor.
None of this is funny.
In 1960, Robert F Kennedy’s political philosophy as the campaign manager for his brother was do anything to win, and then to do your best to govern morally afterward. He and his family did do tons of sketchy, immoral things to win that election.
The other side has already shown that they are willing to do every immoral thing they need to do to win and then govern as immorally as they want. They don’t care. They are laughing. They think their ideology is every bit as superior as we do and don’t care if they are right or wrong.
Doug Stanhope is probably my favorite current political stand up comedian and has purposefully never commented on Trump on stage since his emergence. He already predicted Trump over ten years ago.
The only time he has commented on Trump that I know of was once on an English talk show for forty seconds, and he said all that needed to be said.
— Matt (@matthewjohn1212) June 28, 2018
His favorite comedian and now mine was Mitch Hedberg, who never once made a political joke, but was mostly silly. What he left behind is all productive.
The November elections are the time limit on political comedy for me. If something transformative does not happen after those elections, the notion for at least now must be that political comedy as a social redeeming force is a notion that failed.
Obviously, I don’t want it suppressed, but I don’t think I can support it anymore. Something else must be done to stop us from becoming the largest, most powerful dictatorship in the history of mankind.
At that point, you either have to agree with George Carlin that watching our extinction is funny and we should do nothing but laugh as we watch it happen, unite in silliness, or you must stop laughing forever until it gets much better.
