Yukking it up in the Fray.

Hope Springs Eternal: Neal Pollack's "When The Laughter Stopped: Bob Hope's 100 Years of Radical Politics" prompts a bunch of questions over in Low Concept Fray.

It ain't the Cosmo Quiz, but read the piece and scratch out your musings if it's a slow work day:

Is Pollack Funny?: Geoff, long the anti's party leader, blasts "Is this mediocrity gonna become a regular columnist?" White_Rabbit casts a shadow on Pollack's intent, but finds some humor here:

Satire gains its power from having at least some connection to reality. This bit of strangeness from Neal Pollack goes out of its way to deny reality. Its funniest parts have nothing to do with Bob Hope, but with Gloria Steinem et al., whose radical liberalism he manages to skewer despite himself. His main target, though, he all but completely misses.

Is Bob Hope Funny?: Doodahman (whose "My Two Cents" in Dear Prudence Fray yesterday was a howler) claims, "I know funny. I love funny. I live for funny. And Bob Hope? HE AIN'T FUNNY." TalkingOnMySoapbox2 agrees, but concedes that just because "I never laughed nor grinned at his material…so what? Millions more enjoyed his brand of humor and just because I (and apparently quite a few Slate readers) didn't should not matter." Nemo waxes nostalgic for the old man here.  And Geoff digs out some primary sources to the Fray here, a catalog of Hope zingers here, which raprap appends here.   

Are you a good satirist or a really bad one if people can't tell that you are writing satire? That's the question posed by the_advocate, and it launches a monster critical debate. Geoff counters with, "Do you do syllogisms?" and spells out his equation for humor here that concludes "Satire = Funny." Doodahman is a humanities guy, telling Geoff here, "Stick to math and leave literature and art to the professionals. The most classic piece of satire ever written was Swift's 'A Modest Proposal.' It is the original model for satire. Guess what? It ain't funny." Of course, this launches the next debate…

Is "A Modest Proposal" Funny? Geoff ambles over to his bookshelf, pulls out his copy and excerpts from Swift here and again here, noting that "if that doesn't strike you as funny, your humor's got some kind of congenital defect." Doodahman's answer:

…Perhaps you should consider something that is painfully obvious to most people: context matters. The detailed description of roasting Irish babies seems funny to you now because it represents a response to conditions several hundred years' past. That much time has a tendency to drain the horror out of it. Of course, if the starvation of the Irish peasantry were occurring TODAY, and this piece was published, would you laugh out loud, in public? Yes, it is "dry." But humorous? Only several centuries later when the circumstances have been resolved.

Finally…Zathras challenges Fraysters to "Write three jokes for Bob Hope about Neal Pollack." You can yuk it up Low Concept-style here….KA9:10 a.m.

Thursday, May 29, 2003

Rocket Fuel: Some Sports Nutters have representational issues with Charles P. Pierce's characterization of Roger Clemens as baseball's "Last Great Flake."Adam_Masin paints Clemens as "scary intense, but not a flake," then points to Wade Boggs and David Eckstein— both notorious for eating the same meal before every game—as paragons of flakiness.

Naturally, the Yankee partisan gets in a parting word at Pierce: "figures the writer writes for a Boston publication."

Echoguy agrees with Adam and unfurls a laundry list of baseball flakes that includes:

Tug McGraw who, when asked, "do you prefer to pitch on turf or on grass?" answered, "I don't know; I've never smoked turf," is a flake.

Doc Ellis, who pitched a no-hitter on LSD, is a flake.

Jay Johnstone, who thought a hotfoot or bubble gum on the ol' cap, was the pinnacle of humor, was a flake.

Adrian Beltre, who insisted on different accommodations when convinced that his Milwaukee hotel room was haunted, is a flake.

BigIron takes up for Pierce, first answering Adam's Boston-bashing with, "As for Pierce writing from Boston, I think that would give him greater knowledge and insight. Pierce, of course, also works for Esquire and ESPN. It's not like Pierce was ripping Clemens—quite the opposite!"

Then he provides more Clemens fodder: 

In his famous 1990 nutty, in addition to the Ninja Turtle stuff and the eyeblack, Clemens had the words "Obsessed Rebel" on the back of his spikes (at least that's where I think he'd printed it). Then there was the famous incident in (IIRC) 1993, when he was late to camp and, after this caused a bit of a stir, upon his arrival he wore a walkman doing laps while rookie manager Butch Hobson tried to talk with him for the first time.