“Oh, what’s he done this time?” you ask, with a mix of impatience and exasperation.
“Compared the President of the United States to a ‘biracial’ Oreo cookie,” I reply without hesitation.
And all of this anti-Obama rhetoric is really about shaming the Obamas for trying to suggest that maybe America should eat a bit healthier than they have historically. The racism is just to try to wink-and-nod at his listeners who find this kind of bile amusing.
Head, meet desk. Repeat.
Usually Limbaugh hides his racism better than that.
@Tis #1:
I guess that he had such a bad run with shameless douchebaggery not too long ago that he’s going to try it again. If at first you don’t succeed, fail miserably again. And again. Repeat until you lose your ad money.
Rush defends his show with the idea that he’s an entertainer and he’s trying to be funny and that when people get offended they’re just taking him more seriously than they should, which is a way for him to conveniently get to say whatever he wants, and when it goes badly he can just avoid having to defend what he says.
The problem is that he’s absolutely not funny in the least. He (predictably) takes on what he feels are liberal sacred cows and thinks that, somehow, that makes him transgressive an amusing, but he really just seems irrelevant and desperate to me.
Years ago I read someone say that humour usually relies on being mean to someone or some group.
When the target is powerful and privileged, then humour becomes a good way to bring them down a peg or two.
When that target is already weak and downtrodden, then making fun of them is just bullying, and anyone with a scrap of conscience won’t find it funny st all.
Which is why conservative “humour” isn’t.
Right — punching up is funny and subversive, punching down is bullying and provincial.
Put another way, the rule about comedy is that tragedy is when I stub my toe, comedy is when you fall in a manhole and die. It’s almost entirely about someone else’s pain. If you empathize with the oppressed group, and we do tend to do that around these parts, we feel like it’s our toes being stubbed.
Then again, there are funny things that can be funny based on building scenarios where the “other” that we’re laughing at is entirely fictional and almost entirely divorced from reality.
Exactly stuartvo, punching down is a great way to get cheap laughs from yahoo’s, but it’s a bad way to actually be “humorous”. Back when I was doing amateur nights regularly we would often get one of those guys with their collection of misogynist jokes, thinking that they were sooooo witty. Those guys never came back,or if they did they learned their lesson.
Whenever Rush claims to be an entertainer instead of a political operative I always wonder why he hasn’t been cancelled yet, he’s simply not that funny.
No he isn’t
I WANT THAT COOKIE! (And so does Rush Limbaugh. Who is he kidding?)
“It was a joke” is what a bully says when caught bullying. Limbaugh has been bullying people for years and whenever his bullying is pointed out he claims he’s “being funny”.