WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RIGHT-WING HUMOR AND A VEGAN CUPCAKE?

  The recent flap about Jeff Sessions's "island in the Pacific" comments is perhaps notable for the reasons everyone says it is, but his post-flap weasel response is the burr under my saddle. 

  When people objected to his implication that a Hawaii judge was somehow less legitimate than a landlocked jurist, Sessions trotted out what's become a widely popular shield against critics, the old "my critics don't have a sense of humor" gambit. I won't claim this tiresome weasel dance is an exclusively right wing phenomenon, although it's certainly been used by Trump and his apologists numerous times. Since I'm on the left, I imagine I tend to notice it more often from the right, but no doubt right wing readers have been irked by liberal use of it. 

  Accusations that others don't have a sense of humor can't be evaluated without some agreement on what humor is, what constitutes a "sense" of it, and the side issue of how the public is to understand when humor is intended. None of these things have ever inspired anything approaching a consensus in this country, and American commitment to the importance of humor in our dialogue is similar to our attitudes about free speech. Mostly we pay lip service to these two supposedly essential things, while using them to pillory our enemies and inoculate ourselves against criticism. 

As "free speech" has become a precious thing you're taking away from me when you call me on some bullshit I said, a "sense of humor" is the crucial human trait you lack when you're suggesting that a public utterance of mine reveals something unacceptable about me. 

  Humor is not always the skewering of absurd human behavior, but much of it certainly is. Thus, before we even get into the "funny" aspect of it, we find ourselves in hot water. Do we agree on what human behavior is absurd?
Of course not. Our current president's style is seen through very different lenses by different people, as we've all had to learn. Where many are happy to downplay or spin his various activities, others make fun of him. I'd argue that his various pathologies cause an exaggeration of acceptable human behavior so egregious it really isn't a good subject for humor. In our recent podcast conversation, Tom Alderson memorably referred to Takoma Park as "a fat battleship" inviting ridicule, and if that's the case, then Trump seems more like a planet. I haven't shared in the widespread amusement over SNL's satire of Trump and his coterie, not so much because the subject isn't funny, but because Trump is such a caricature to begin with. 

  The skewering type of humor is the vast majority of all humor. In fact, when I'm sleep-deprived (my normal condition as a parent and musician), I have trouble coming up with an example of humor that isn't subversive or critical in some way. (Puns and other wordplay, in my apparently fringe view, are generally not humor. I base this on my observation that they don't make me laugh. Even people who profess to like such things usually don't laugh at them; they just say things like "Oh, that's funny." My rule of thumb is that if someone says something is funny, it probably isn't.) 

  Some will question my point here, and I direct them to my associate Mark Twain. If they choose to see humor differently than he did, I suppose that's their right in a free society. If we accept my notion that humor is virtually always at the expense of someone or something, then the question becomes this: 

  What's the difference between being humorous and just being an asshole? 

  I've noticed that much humor I hear from the right is skewering the underprivileged, the downtrodden, the minority due to ethnicity or sexuality or idea, etc. Conservatives like an underdog, when he's white and/or conservative, but other underdogs are often seen as a thorn in the American side, a "special interest" rather than a legitimate citizen. As a leftist, I'm more inclined to see humor's appropriate role as the puncturing of the powerful, rather than the kneecapping of the powerless, but that's a general tendency and not a rule. 

  

  So, I'm not trying to suggest that humor at the expense of minorities or the underprivileged isn't ever acceptable. Nor am I claiming that I never find it funny. It seems to me that many people automatically laugh at jokes about people they don't respect even when the joke isn't funny, while other times people refuse to laugh at a "politically incorrect" joke despite its wit. I like to flatter myself by concluding I'm in the sensible middle. I am saying, however, that humor that risks being seen as merely small minded and mean damn well better be funny. And often, it falls short of that standard. 

  Two different situations occur regularly. We'll refer to them thusly: 

1. The National Review situation. 

This is where the editor attempts to be funny, in the weak tea manner of a bonhomous Shriner. I suppose this version is relatively benign, although in the context of a column larded with half-truths and balletlike leaps of logic, I'm more irritated by the clubfooted attempt at humor than I might be in another circumstance. It falls somewhere between an unforced baseball error and Evel Knievel plunging into an abyss. 

2. The Jeff Sessions/Trump situation. 

Here's where my grudging tolerance of the comedically challenged NR editor evaporates. Sessions in his recent dismissive comment about the island-based judge, and Trump in various other examples I've forgotten, commit a sin against humor when they claim people didn't understand they were joking. Guys like that who've spent decades gladhanding their way through a professional environment shot through with asskissers and favor seekers  are entirely capable of failing at comedy, but unfortunately they're also capable of using the humor shield in an attempt to deflect critics. I think this may be the thing that I hate about them the most. If a guy has tendencies toward despotism, let him take pride in it, I say. If, during a tour of his house, someone is showing me a heinously ill-conceived bas-relief they've inexplicably commissioned and paid for, I'm damned if I want to hear them waffling about it when my face betrays my lack of enthusiasm. It's your fucking bas-relief, and why you wanted a three-dimensional rendering of Broderick Crawford, or Tom Bosley, is beyond me, but own it for Christ's sake!