Feb.20

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Humor Hath Charms: I Stopped Calling the Toilet "John" and Named It "Jim" Instead

And here it is, the third (potential) new feature we have introduced this week. Is that just a coincidence? Not exactly, although the underlying dynamic is probably not exactly what you think. We have a bunch of things on the back burner right now that we really need to get to. And if we don't start getting to them, they will become more and more stale. We started the "getting on top of things" process with the new features, because we felt the three dot journalism concept (huge, overwhelmingly positive feedback, by the way), needed to get up and running ASAP. The other two concepts, which otherwise could have waited a bit longer, came along for the ride.

As the headline implies, the focus of this feature, if we keep it, will be political humor of various types. We have (tentatively) commenced with this concept for two reasons. The first is that we get a lot of material of this sort, and we don't often have a great way to fit it in. The second is that everyone can use a laugh once in a while, especially right now.

We envision a broad swath of content, reflecting various types of political humor, both contemporary and historical. For example, we've been sitting on a collection of Donald Trump "award" memes like this one:

As we understand it, Trump locked down the victory by having Pam Bondi sweep his opponent's knee, thus rendering that opponent unable to continue.

Sometimes, we'll go with one-liner-type humor, particularly if the joke is associated with a particular political figure, past or present. For example, here's one of Ronald Reagan's favorites:

Fidel Castro had just started one of his long, boring speeches when an older man in the crowd was heard yelling, "Peanuts! Popcorn! Cracker Jack!"

Castro paused for a moment, glared at the crowd, but then continued his speech. Moments later, that same voice yelled, "Peanuts! Popcorn! Cracker Jack!"

That did it. The incensed Castro screamed out, "The next person I hear say that, I will personally kick his ass all the way to Miami Beach!"

Immediately, the whole crowd shouted, "Peanuts! Popcorn! Cracker Jack!"

One of these days, if this feature lives on, we'll do a whole entry on Reagan's communist/Soviet humor. Oh, and if readers are not familiar with the (admittedly, not political) one-liner from the headline of this item, the punchline is: "I feel much better being able to tell people I go to the Jim every morning, without fail."

There are lots of other things we could include—anecdotes, contemporary and historical political cartoons, reader-generated responses to a prompt, possibly a game or two, re-visits of classic political humor on TV (say, SNL sketches, or famous moments from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour), reviews/commentaries of classic political films/farces (say, Dr. Strangelove). That means some entries would be history lessons more than ha-ha funny, but we think that would still be interesting to readers, and might give some context to modern-day political humor.

Two other notes of explanation. First, we're only launching this on Friday because it was a busy week. We already have two regular features on Friday, and don't need to have a third. The weekly humor feature would run some other day of the week, very possibly Mondays. Second, some targets work better than others when it comes to political humor, and the party in power pretty much always gets to spend the lion's share of the time as the butt of the joke. So, it is way more likely that if we move forward with this, and there are 50 entries in the next 50 weeks, the Trump administration will be under the microscope far more often than, say, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will be. That's just the nature of the beast.

Now, we want to launch this feature with some actual content, not just explainers and examples. We thought hard about what to use for Entry #1, and we decided we wanted some reader-driven content out of the gate. So, we're going with something we've actually been sitting on for a few months. As readers might recall, we posted this picture of J.D. Vance back in September:

We knew what the dominant theme of the answers would be (it ended up being a little over two-thirds of them). If you have the browser skills, you can look and see what we named the photo. Anyhow, here's a Letterman-style rundown of our 10 favorite answers, including several on that theme:

1. S.S. in West Hollywood, CA: We can confirm the President is a grower and not a shower.
   
   
2. S.T. in Philadelphia, PA: The client list on Bondi's desk is THIS thick.
   
   
3. M.S. in Westport, CT: Sen. John Thune (R-SD) looks on as J.D. Vance confuses "Speaker Johnson" with "the Speaker's Johnson."
   
   
4. G.H. in Tacoma, WA: This is how the Pope answered when I asked him about my chances of getting into heaven.
   
   
5. Anonymous in NC: How do I know, with such precision? Trump borrowed my sofa.
   
   
6. O.B. in Los Angeles, CA: You have to understand that, for President Trump, immigration is a teeny weenie problem.
   
   
7. M.P. in Leasburg, MO: We are THIS close to invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment!
   
   
8. J.B. in Chicago, IL: The three of us and the President compared sizes this morning. This was Sen. Thune's winning entry.
   
   
9. B.M. in Oakland, CA: By executive order, from now on, this is 8 inches.
   
   
10. Anonymous in CA: Not pictured: Pete Hegseth doing pushups to tire out the voice in his head telling him he's gay.

That's pretty much the long and short of it.

If you care to let us know: (1) If you like this feature idea or not and want to see it continue and/or (2) What we should name the feature—we just used "Humor Hath Charms" as a placeholder—if we do continue it and/or (3) something you might like to see us cover in this space, please send a message to comments@electoral-vote.com. (Z)