Liberal Humor: Just Downright Mean

Liberals are different from you and me, assuming that you, dear reader are not a liberal. And it’s not just that we vote differently. Our whole outlook is different. These differences occasionally make their way into the popular press when a publicity seeking behavioral scientist conducts a study that judges responses to various stimuli from self-identified liberals or conservatives.

While perusing the paper the other day I saw a headline reporting on just such a story. The headline stated that conservatives are more “squeamish” than liberals. I did not immediately trouble myself with reading the story. Such pseudo-scientific balderdash appears once or twice a year when some academic crank tries to paint conservatism as a sort of mental illness. My wife, however, actually read the article and arrived at a different conclusion than the headline writer.

What the study actually concluded was that conservatives were more easily disgusted by such things as filthy toilet seats. The bias was in the journalism and not the research itself. The headline could just as easily as read, “Liberals are pigs.”

But, the article did point up the fact that liberals and conservatives are different in ways more fundamental than just party affiliation.

You know this instinctively. When you see a car plastered with bumper stickers, you don’t have to get close enough to read the bumper stickers to know that the driver is a liberal. Conservatives simply do not use their cars to broadcast their views. Doing so is like walking down the street with a powerful boom box loudly playing metal rap. Polite people don’t do it.

Liberals and conservatives also have very different senses of humor. Liberals seem to find entertainment when misery and misfortune befalls someone who fails to conform to their template. Recently comedienne Wanda Sykes was cracking jokes at the White House Correspondents dinner and laid down this knee slapper: “I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight.”

This brought forth a round of guffaws from most of the assembled, including President Barack Obama.

Sykes is not the first to laugh at substance addiction. Such jokes are sometimes made at the expense of liberals. Here’s one of my favorites: How many Ted Kennedys does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Just one. He holds the bulb and drinks until the room spins.

I will concede that there is an element of meanness in both jokes. But Sykes’ joke is both unimaginative and humorless. Nevertheless, those gathered, including our president, laughed it up. She also said that she’d like to see Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys fail and inspired another round of hardy har hars.

And wishing death upon a non-conformist is not unique. Fifteen years ago USA Today columnist Julianne Malveaux took aim at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and quipped that she hoped that, “his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease.”

Is there even a trace of humor in that statement, or is it just pure meanness? And I ask, can anyone point to a single incident of a prominent conservative wishing death upon a liberal? Keep in mind that Julianne Malveaux remains a prominent voice of the left.

Not even children are immune from liberal venom. David Letterman famously aroused a few yucks by speculating that Sarah Palin’s 14 year-old daughter might have been “knocked up” by Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez. A couple of days later he revised and extended his remarks to claim that he was actually making a crude sexual joke about Palin’s 18 year-old daughter, not her 14 year-old daughter.
That’s so much better.

But is it possible that I found the joke offensive because it was aimed at a conservative? No. When I imagined a similar joke aimed at Barack Obama’s daughters, it still wasn’t funny.

Just last week, humorist Eric Sean Nelson celebrated the news that Sarah Palin was resigning as Alaska governor by cracking retard jokes about Palin’s year old Down’s Syndrome baby. Classy.

And now that the crude and oafish Al Franken has joined the United States Senate, we can expect more such liberal levity. He is, after all the man who humorously fantasized about conservative commentator Bill Bennett getting shot in the head. Such hilarity.

Was this what Michelle Obama meant when she said America was "just downright mean?"