Weigel

The New York Times covered the Onion's truly funny series of Joe Biden articles and videos which cover the vice president as an unrecognizable lech and petty crook.

"People kept trying to peg him as a buffoon," said Carol Kolb, head writer for The Onion News Network, the comedy newspaper’s online video producer. "We just abandoned that and put him in silly uniforms and had him opening a crab shack."

This is doubly amusing because, for some reason, people really want to believe that Biden is a shambling goon. One of YouTube's weirder political offerings is a video claiming to show Biden dancing and drunk-singing the theme song for Florida's Villages. It has nearly 500,000 views, but 1) the man in the video isn't Biden and 2) Biden doesn't drink. The public demand for Biden to be more like Harry Nilsson or Burt Reynolds is insatiable.