"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream."

Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose broke up the Sweedish contractors and threw change in the tip jar and put on her warm magic apron."

And I laughed not because that is nonsense, but because it's a quite brilliant contribution to a conversation that was pretty far along at that point, including betamax3000's extended interpretation of "The White Album." Beta had said:

Like the White Album perhaps Althouse is telling us there are secret messages to be found, backwards.

"Sweetly up broke voice, her rose melody."

"Upon magic human warm her of little."

"Out tipped change."

It all began with a sentence from "The Great Gatsby," which was about — not a woman laughing — a woman singing. But women laugh all the time in "The Great Gatsby." For example: "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly."

"These 'Gatsby' posts are becoming the new café around here" — "café" posts are open threads  — I say as I drink my coffee and contemplate today's Gatsby sentence, which I'd said will be "I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

I picked that sentence after searching my Kindle copy of "Gatsby" for "potato" after betamax3000 said:

Yesterday was "gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder," today is "tipped out a little of her warm human magic." Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

And that was funny, because — before getting out of bed this morning — I'd been toying with the idea of saying: In that "Melody rose" sentence, Fitzgerald intended us to think of semen when we read about "warm human magic" that tipped out of the vessel that is the woman.
 
And betamax added:

My God: if we get to the sentence involving Daisy, the potato and the gardener I just don't know what is going to happen.

Which is what had me looking for "potato" in "Gatsby," not finding it, and suspecting that betamax was making a canny reference to "Lady Chatterly's Lover." I buy "Lady Chatterly's Lover" in Kindle just so I can search for "potato"! My literary pursuits are a tad — a tot — bizarre. I find:

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer.'"

And:

"I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now."

Drudge features huge, horrible Pelosi laughing skull-face.

This is expressive:



You have to click over to Drudge to get the real effect. The picture is huge. The link goes here.)

St. John’s University's so-called “Dean of Mean” Cecilia Chang commits suicide "after a disastrous stint on the witness stand that left jurors laughing at her tortured explanations."

"Under withering cross-examination by prosecutors, Chang's answers became so lengthy and circuitous that the judge continually reminded her to simply answer yes or no...."

When Chris Wallace raises the topic of Libya, David Axelrod laughs.

On Fox News Sunday just now:



ADDED: Here's the transcript.

"Do you think the campaigns made an agreement that the candidates would have the exact same interaction at the beginning and end of each debate?"

"They always pat each other on the side of the arm while laughing, as if one of them had said something funny in the previous split-second."

Joe Biden at the debate reminded me of Steve Carrell in "The Office.

Here's something I wrote yesterday under the heading "How would you have reacted to Joe Biden?"

In real life, [t]here are different reactions, depending on how much of a friendship you have and... sometimes you're in a situation where you must maintain your demeanor, despite the other guy's antagonism. For example, in a job interview or a discussion with your boss or maybe when you were a kid and your father was exerting his authority. The VP debate is also, obviously, one of those situations. Imagine if Ryan had given Biden the finger? Ryan is a young man, he had to have been thinking of the various reactions that you'd use in an ordinary social situation, even as he rejected each one and told himself that he had to keep acting as if Biden were not behaving inappropriately.

A discussion with your boss.... It's like on "The Office." The employees are continually repressing their reaction to the boss — Steve Carrel's character Michael Scott. Example:



The boss is having a grand time, and he thinks he's a great guy, and socially, it's utterly dysfunctional, because he gets no proper feedback, because he's the boss. "The Office" has been so extraordinarily popular, I think, because viewers identify so strongly with the employees. Personally, I have difficulty watching the show. I understand the humor, but the identification with the oppressed employees is so strong that it's painful, and since it's the situation of this situation comedy, the pain is chronic.

Here's another "Office" clip:



Key line: "Have you ever been to Scranton Jan?" Scranton! Scranton is Joe Biden's home town!

"My name is Joe Biden and as strange as it sounds, everything important in my life that I’ve learned here in Scranton, I’m serious.... You are the grit, the sinew and the soul of what freedom is all about, sounds corny, but you really are, you are a special group of people, this is a special place and this soul is thick with pride and loyalty."

Picture Michael Scott pestering his employees with a morale-building speech when they just want to get back to work. Back to work... in Scranton... where unemployment is 10%.

How would you have reacted to Joe Biden?

Meade and I were just having a conversation, not about politics. About baseball, actually. I was expressing an idea I had. (It doesn't matter what my idea was, but in case your curiosity is distracting, my idea was that to enjoy baseball, you need to watch the game in real time, with the slow parts left in, and once you start fast-forwarding to the parts that look exciting, it ruins the experience, and you might as well just read a report of what happened.) Meade keeps scoffing and laughing really annoyingly, until I get the joke that he's doing his Joe Biden imitation.... at which point I give him the finger. Suddenly, I realize that is the normal reaction to Biden's antics. Give him the finger.

There are other reactions when someone acts like that, laughing in your face, rolling their eyes, smirking, every time you're trying to say something. It's incredibly antagonizing! In real life, what do you do? There are different reactions, depending on how much of a friendship you have and how much you know about this person's propensity toward physical violence and whether you have a good escape route.

But sometimes you're in a situation where you must maintain your demeanor, despite the other guy's antagonism. For example, in a job interview or a discussion with your boss or maybe when you were a kid and your father was exerting his authority. The VP debate is also, obviously, one of those situations. Imagine if Ryan had given Biden the finger? Ryan is a young man, he had to have been thinking of the various reactions that you'd use in an ordinary social situation, even as he rejected each one and told himself that he had to keep acting as if Biden were not behaving inappropriately.

And what was going through Biden's head? (♪♫What goes on in Biden's brain?♪♫) Did the old man lose control of his bodily functions? Let's assume he had a strategy and was deliberately annoying, distracting, bullying, and rude. Why would he adopt such a strategy? Has he no self-respect? Maybe he's okay with his longstanding "Old Joe" reputation. He's a clown. A gaffe machine. So what? Everyone already thinks that. Flip it! Weaponize clownery. If it was a plan, it was a plan to provoke Ryan. What if Ryan suddenly gave him the finger? Where's your choir boy now, Ryanistas?

Clips from the debate: the montage of Biden laughing at one serious thing after another.

I'm sure many, many people who watched the debate said — as I did — somebody needs to clip together all of Biden's laughing while Ryan was saying something that wasn't funny. The RNC got its montage — a web ad — out before the night was over:



There's the debate, watched in real time, and the effect it has on people's minds. CNN did a poll about that:

Forty-eight percent of voters who watched the vice presidential debate think that Rep. Paul Ryan won the showdown, according to a CNN/ORC International nationwide poll conducted right after Thursday night's faceoff. Forty-four percent say that Vice President Joe Biden was victorious....

By a 50%-41% margin, debate watchers say that Ryan rather than Biden better expressed himself.

Seven in ten said Biden was seen as spending more time attacking his opponent, and that may be a contributing factor in Ryan's 53%-43% advantage on being more likable. Ryan also had a slight advantage on being more in touch with the problems of average Americans.

Post-debate, we get people reacting to the reactions. (If everyone's saying X won, that makes some people feel like being for X, the winner.) And we get the quotes from the transcript, analyzed. (See my previous post.) And, perhaps most important, we get the video clips, with each side using what's usable. As Peggy Noonan writes in her column about the debate:

Because the debate was so rich in charge and countercharge, and because it covered so much ground, both parties will be able to mine the videotape for their purposes. On the attack in Benghazi, the question that opened the debate, Mr. Biden was on the defensive and full of spin. He pivoted quickly to talking points, a move that was at once too smooth and too clumsy. He was weak on requests for added security before the consulate was overrun and the ambassador killed. "We will get to the bottom of this." Oh. Good.

I look forward to more mining of the videotape. But this first one, from the RNC, is powerful. It's obvious — didn't we all think of doing this? — but they did it quickly, gave us just what we said out loud in our living rooms somebody should do, and they did it well.

Urban Dictionary's Word of the Day: laugh.

"A smile having an orgasm."

Dude1: Oh dude look at that smile it's totally orgasming
Dude2: That's called a laugh...

"Ah ha ha ha ha ha..."

Demonstrating that bulimia had destroyed her gag reflex...

... a woman laughs inopportunely.

Laughing rats.

Via James Taranto, who tweaks the scientists as having "lonely lives" (since they are resorting to tickling rats). But I think it means something, if animals laugh — if they play and have fun — and it's not all survival instinct.

Note that the rats don't just laugh, they latch on to The Hand as a playmate and chase it around, eager to engage it in more fun times.

"Cosmo remains the ne plus ultra of usually implausible, occasionally unfathomable, and invariably hilarious sexy tips..."

... so here are the 44 most ridiculous ones.

Did I ever tell you about the job I had (before I went to law school) reading magazines? We produced a monthly report for advertisers that required us to categorize every article in about 100 magazines. I read a lot of magazines circa 1974. Cosmo was nowhere near as explicit about sex back then, but it was always its own special world of implausible pleasure. We spent many hours reading things out loud to each other and cracking up (an activity that's kind of like blogging).

Of these 44, I'm not sure what's most ridiculous because there's a cumulative effect. But I think #37 made me laugh the most:

"Give him a beer facial - the combination of the egg white and the yeast in the hops hydrates and improves skin elasticity... but you can just tell him that your lips can't resist his delicious, beer-flavored face."

I would have laughed more, but the idea of salmonella upsets me.

"By laughing out loud on the radio, they gave permission for you at home to laugh too."

The "Car Talk" guys are retiring. Did you like them or did they annoy you? If you liked/didn't like them, was their constant laughing part of the reason why?

Bill Maher to Rush Limbaugh: "You know what, Rush, when you can stand up in front of an audience of 3,000 people all the time like I do..."

I've already blogged about what Bill Maher said on his show last night about Rush Limbaugh, so forgive me if you've already had enough of the Maher-Limbaugh topic, but this really is something else and I have something different to say. Maher said:

The word that they're upset about. I never said on this show.

What is he referring to? He did call Sarah Palin a "dumb twat" on the show. (See?)

It was in my standup act, which I consider the last bastion of free speech. 

The word, apparently, is "cunt," and he used it in his standup show. He tones it down a notch for HBO.

There's a reason people compare me to George Carlin — 'cause we're standup comedians. 

By the way, "twat" wasn't even on  Carlin's original list of "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." "Cunt" was. Later, Carlin expanded the list, and "twat" got on along with "fart" and "turd." It's like a late year in the history of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, when The Beatles and The Rolling Stones got in long ago, like 2002 and they're getting around to Gene Pitney and Brenda Lee. It's an analogy! I don't owe Brenda an apology. If people are too dumb to handle analogies, why do we even have democracy? Let's just make Obama king, stop talking about politics, and spend our lives dancing and singing.

Did you watch that Carlin clip? Astounding! Maher cites "people" who compare him to George Carlin. He doesn't dare claim the comparison sprang out of his own semi-bald dome. But I'll compare him to Carlin: Bill Maher is not at all as funny or perceptive as George Carlin. Now that's a comparison. What did those other people who compared Maher to Carlin say? I'd like to know, because I'd like to do a comparison comparison. I think mine is better.

Back to this quote from last night that I'm trying to analyze:

Rush Limbaugh likes to say he's a comedian. 

No, he doesn't! Rush's critics like to call him a comedian. When it suits their purposes. Other times they like to say he's the spokesman for the Republican Party. And that's what Rush likes to say. I listen to the show all the time, so I know what he likes to say. Unlike a lot of people who love to hate Rush and simply react to out-of-context quotes they've been fed.

But Rush uses humor. He likes to "use absurdity to illustrate the absurd."

Mayer continues:

You know what, Rush, when you can stand up in front of an audience of 3,000 people all the time like I do and make them spill their fuckin' guts out and laugh their asses off for 90 minutes, you're a comedian. 

Rush doesn't do theater shows — which tend to be scripted with crafted jokes told one after the other — and let's grant Maher that Rush would be bad at that. But Rush does sit down at a microphone 3 hours a day, 5 days a week and hold the attention of not 3,000 people but many millions. For 20 years. Maher could not do that. These are different activities. Both deploy humor as they talk about politics, but they do it in a different way. Maher's bragging that he's doing much more than Rush... it's as off as the implication that he's as good as Carlin.

But you're not a comedian. And when you do that, I say, my rule: You get a little extra leeway. 

Each humorist can decide for himself how much leeway he's going to take. And people will decide whether to give it to him. He can't dictate a rule, except as a joke. You don't get the leeway because you do standup comedy (or a radio show using absurdity to illustrate absurdity). You get what people feel like giving you. And what we feel is a response to what you do. It's a mystery why we feel the way we do. We're not following any rules. It's a personal relationship, like love.

But if I offended women, I'm sorry. I don't have a problem saying I'm sorry. 

Oh, but you do, Bill. Because that is not an apology. It's easy to say "I'm sorry" in the sorry-if-you-are-offended form, i.e., a nonapology.

I don't know why women would want to align themselves with Sarah Palin. I don't know why an insult to her is an insult to all women, but if it is, I'm sorry.

If... and obviously, you don't think it is. The joke — not a terribly good one, not anything that's going to make us spill our "fuckin' guts" out over— is that women shouldn't see Sarah Palin as one of the women who count. If we can isolate her over there with the bad people, we can call her a name that is specific to women: a "cunt." Is the use of a woman-specific insult something that switches the subject to all women? That is, is "cunt" like a racist epithet? If one black person is called the n-word, the topic ceases to be whether that one black person is a bad guy. Or is "cunt" like "dick"? If one guy is called a "dick," we stay on topic: the way that one guy is a "dick." I wrote "cunt," "dick," and "n-word," so you can see what my answer is. I'm for sexual equality... and abandoning the famously hurtful racial epithet.

So let humorists of all kinds select the language they want to use. Let them be gentle or cutting. There are all sorts of things you can do with words. There are no rules. There are no 7 dirty words for TV or extra leeway for extracting puke from 3,000 theater-ticket buyers. There is a mystery to using words to reach other human beings, and you're all on your own.

"Students Laugh When Obama Tells Them 'You Inspire Me.'"

Hey, those students inspire me! They know how to detect bullshit.

Politico's Ben Smith calls some Gingrich video "Possibly the weirdest video of the cycle."

But the video is down now, so I have no idea what that was about. Other than Christmas.

A little more info, at HuffPo:

The video, posted December 23, features the Republican presidential hopeful's New Hampshire staffers decked out in Santa hats, singing to the tune of "Deck the Halls." While the group sings of Newt's solutions stopping Obama's "trauma," one staffer dons an elf outfit and runs around Gingrich's New Hampshire office.

So... maybe the problem was the implication that an "elf outfit" is "gay apparel." (Paging David Sedaris.)

In other news... a teacher in a Michigan elementary school changed the "Deck the Halls" lyrics after the kids laughed at "Don we now our gay apparel." She made it "bright apparel" and then got publicly criticized for not turning it into a "teachable moment." Video at the link of the principal telling the reporter: "We have an anti-discrimination and bullying policy that includes sexual orientation, and so, going forward, the teacher will be addressing: this is how we're supposed to be reacting, this is how to be respectful about this."

"Gay" is not a bad word... I agree. But can you really teach people not to laugh at the silly line "Don we now our gay apparel"? Nothing makes you want to laugh more than being forbidden to laugh. And "gay" is supposed to mean mirthful. Where's the mirth? If mirth is forbidden because we must be respectful and ever on the alert for incipient bullying, then I think you need to pick another song. But "Deck the Halls" is one of the best secular Christmas songs.

What are you going to do? Maybe we need to recognize that music is not compatible with the highest values of the public schools of the United States:

It's better that our dear youth spend their valuable time in learning respect for all minority groups and essential and useful bullying resisting skills and fill their time with teachable moments and healthy recreations instead of music.

ADDED: My son Chris tells me about the time, years ago, when he was in a public school chorus that had to sing the song "Scarlet Ribbons" and the kids were forbidden to laugh about the line "I peeked in and on her bed/In gay profusion lying there..." Chris IM's:

we had to practice a lot to get to the point where we wouldn't laugh on that line, and we had been able to do it in the last rehearsals, but then in the performance someone laughed, that made everyone laugh, and it made you laugh and you had to cover your face and sort of put your head down

It almost seems like bullying to put the kids through that! [LATER: I just realized that the "you" in his description referred to me! It still makes me laugh right now.]

"'Work It,' an upcoming ABC sitcom about men forced to dress as women to get a job, has angered equality activists..."

"... who see the premise as trivializing the obstacles transgender people face daily in the workplace," writes Jeremy Kinser at Advocate.com:

Although there are no transgender characters on the series, Drian Juarez, project manager for the Transgender Economic Empowerment Program at Los Angeles's Gay and Lesbian Center, finds the promo exploitive [sic]. In a statement released to the press, Juarez says, "What is clearly intended to be a humorous promotional ad for the show depicts the two lead characters, dressed as women, standing at a urinal. Sadly, it’s very common for people to promote fear of sharing the bathroom with transgender people as a means to further their prejudice. We’re frequently portrayed as sexual predators using the bathroom to make sexual advances."

Here's the ad:



Kinser also quotes Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign:

"We've seen a lot of offensive things on TV over the years, but this really takes the cake... The so-called 'comedy' of Work It is based on the premise that male-bodied people who unsuccessfully attempt to present themselves as women are worthy of ridicule. The problem is that most transgender women find themselves in this situation, at least temporarily, during their transition process. And due to the prohibitively high costs of transition-related medical care and widespread insurance inequities, many may be visibly transgender for their entire lives."

Speaking of what takes the cake, the best comedy movie ever made uses the same premise of 2 heterosexual men who dress as women. Is this premise to be avoided because it has something to do with an actual problem actual experienced by some people who may be sympathetic?

If the answer is yes, how many other subjects for comedy would you place off limits to protect the feelings of real people with real problems? Bad marriages, diseases, death, accidents, ugliness, mental illness, farting... ugh! Practically everything funny will be off limits! Or... I don't know... maybe you could still make a comedy about "human rights" activists who starchily insist that nobody laugh anymore. It could be about a group of TV writers — like the old "Dick Van Dyke Show" — except the network has added a "human rights" activist to their team, and she/he shoots down every comic idea they have.

"Passing the sexual Turing test."

It's not easy! The computer hears the laughter on comedy shows and thinks it's porn.

"[W]hat Judge Vinson decides on the constitutional issues is, as a technical legal matter, irrelevant."

From aca litigation blog (which has an excellent collection of documents from the litigation over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act):

The most intense week of news coverage for ACA-related litigation will only become more heavily so tomorrow, as Judge Roger Vinson (N.D. Fla.) will hold a hearing on the parties' respective motions for summary judgment in Florida v. HHS. As with Judge Hudson's decision Monday in Virginia v. Sebelius, what Judge Vinson decides on the constitutional issues is, as a technical legal matter, irrelevant. His judgment will undoubtedly be appealed, and appellate review of legal questions is de novo.

Such contempt for what the district judge does — "as a technical legal matter, irrelevant." But nontechnically, there's a "political dimension" — and that matters.

[T]he more federal judges who invalidate the ACA (or a substantial portion thereof), the more traction and legitimacy those arguments gain. This not only affects current political debates about modifications to the ACA, but it also alters the context in which the Supreme Court will ultimately decide the constitutional questions. In short, the atmospherics--though only atmospherics--are important.

So district judges only matter in the dimension where they don't really belong: politics? Oh, and influencing the Supreme Court — or "alter[ing] the context" in which the Supreme Court operates? Is that not a legal matter? Or... it's a legal matter but not a technical legal matter? There's technical law and there's atmospheric law?

The district judge — in this view — doesn't have any real power. He's more like a journalist — or a law blogger — fogging up the atmosphere with feelings about what the answer ought to be — some sort of miasma that might coalesce into a context.

***

This ties back to our discussion earlier in the week — here and here — about attempts to shape legal opinion by laughing at arguments — trying to create a social context in which smart people — and the people who want to look or believe they are smart — somehow just know that they're not supposed to take certain arguments seriously.

Who needs technical law when you can do atmospheric law?