If you watch evening news, even local news: can you imagine anyone of those anchors genuinely laughing? Like a full-throated belly laugh? Or do you just see fake smiles, veneers, and quickly-suppressed canned chuckles?
The news, and the media as a whole, have become humorless. Even countercultural media has become a professional scold, the humor equivalent of a prim, tight-bun bespectacled headmistress thwapping your digits with a ruler for so much as cracking a smile.
One recent offender is Salon, the liberal news and opinion site, who took beef with Patton Oswalt’s Twitter joke about KTVU news station accidentally reading off fake pilot names (“Ho Lee Fuk, Sum Ting Wong”) from the Asiana crash:
@pattonoswalt: SF news station KTVU has announced hiring PR spokesman Wi So Solly to address the Asiania Airlines on-air gaffe.
A simple joke at the station’s expense.
Salon’s response?
This seems to be a night where it’s clear why race remains central, and why crude and unsophisticated elementary school jokes about it need to be called out, no matter how bullying the joke’s teller may be.
Salon continued with a multi-part article, calling Oswalt “pedantic”, “thin-skinned”, “short of being funny”, part of a group of dated comedians who even in 1993 “weren’t all that smart”, and with a Twitter feed that’s a “cesspool”.
This is their justification:
No one who laughed at that joke did so because he ripped the TV station a new one. No, they laughed at the actual punch line, the Asian name ‘Wi So Sorry.’
Oswalt responded:
I was making fun of KTVU. I WAS MAKING FUN OF KTVU. I WAS MAKING FUN OF KTVU. The “Wi So Solly” Tweet was my follow-up, what we comedians call a “tag”. Again, I was making fun of their rush to be “first”, their sloppy…
Fuck. I shouldn’t have to repeat this. You should’ve understood it the first time I explained it, earlier. No, fuck that. You should’ve understood it before I wrote all of this. But this is like explaining Game of Thrones to a brine shrimp, isn’t it?
I humbly would like to don my clown nose, glasses, and tweed suit and diagnose Salon’s problem.
Some would call it humorlessness. I would call it humor insecurity. These are people who couldn’t crack a knock knock joke if they tried. The funniest moment of their lives was at the 1996 Christmas party where they belted out a line about sitting on Santa’s lap to dead silence.
Here are a few steps for them to overcome their humor insecurity: lightening up, getting over themselves, and tickling their vestigial funny bones once in a goddamn while. I’m going to write them a prescription for nitrous oxide, taken through an inhaler until they can get past their hangups and laugh at a fucking joke instead of attacking a comedian making a valid point.
