Black Pinocchio?

 

Is Lying Funny?

-By Dan Scott

What is funny many times is only in the eye of the beholder and those with the proper context to appreciate the absurdity of the moment.  We can find humor in many things if we aren’t too close to the object of the humor.  David Leisure who did the Joe Isuzu TV commercials  back in the 1980s was extraordinarily funny with his transparently obvious lies while promoting vehicles.  Who didn’t find his absurdly false promises and assertions funny?  During the Iraq War, Baghdad Bob, the Iraqi (dis) Information Minister, gave America wonderful comic relief when he absurdly proclaimed the Iraqi Army was beating US forces.  His colorful descriptions added even more to the hilarity of the moment.  On the other hand, the Arab world believed every word and bought it hook, line and sinker. They were in total shock when US forces took Baghdad.

As we saw with Baghdad Bob, propaganda can be funny but that depends on who is watching.  Context is everything in comedy.  A joke’s subject matter depends on it’s audience.  When looking at old Soviet Union propaganda, at the time it wasn’t funny, but now some 30 years later it’s funny because we have the context of how absurd it was.  Today few laugh at Barrack Obama’s seemingly continuous stream of “misstatements”.  Prior to his election, one web site documented 158 of them.  Another site is keeping track of 510 promises Barrack Obama made during his campaign.  Shades of Jimmy Carter who put a book together called Promises, Promises to keep track of them all.  Since then Barrack Obama has continued with his less than forthright proclamations. In fact I wrote about three of them recently.  Others have also picked up on more whoppers as well.  Barrack Obama and his allies in Congress make claims of Transparent Government, however, they are the very people who obstruct anyone who wishes to look behind the curtain.  The so called Economic Stimulus/Rescue Bill was a classic demonstration on how to run an opaque legislative process through secretive bill writing, adding voluminous points which had no relation to the intent of the bill and not allowing sufficient time for an individual, i.e. a lawmaker, to even read the bill in the time allotted much less understand or score it. 

Bipartisanship seems to be another misstatement of the absurd.  When we think of bipartisanship we get the image of two groups of people with opposing ideas crafting legislation which reflects the degree of compromises each side is willing to make.  Nothing could be further from the truth as to what is currently happening in Congress with the acquiescence of Barrack Obama.  Bipartisanship has been redefined to mean finding three liberal senators in the GOP who will vote for the measure by meeting their low standards.  Bipartisanship has become the joke just as Transparency has become a joke.  So far, neither is funny but they are certainly absurd.

President Obama’s kind of, sort of, State of the Union speech was nothing more than another demonstration of making absurdly false statements under the cloak of seriousness but once again, his humor was not recognized. The idea that national health care saves money and delivers more service is a joke already played on the British and Canadians.  Another epitome of absurdity was the announcement during the Governors meeting that they needed to trim the federal budget deficit! These are the same clowns who said give us money to bail us out, i.e. the Economic Stimulus bill. So here they deficit spent on one bill and then proclaim we need to see savings in the 2009 federal budget all the while passing another bill with 9000 earmarks. Obama proclaimed he is going to cut the deficit in half by 2013, now that’s absurd since he plans to run it to $1.75 trillion in fiscal 2009.  This reminds me of the old snide observation of a store saying they’re running a 50% off sale after they had raised the sticker price up 100%.

It seems to me the current propaganda coming out of the government today is makes no pretense of stretching the borders of absurd, today it isn’t funny, but who knows tomorrow once getting over the shock of having been hoodwinked everyone maybe laughing. Right now like many people I’m not laughing, I’m shocked at the blatantly obvious lying by the people who are running the government.  Sooner or later President Obama and his allies will have jumped the shark  causing the public to cease taking these clowns seriously like the Arab World did with Baghdad Bob and just start laughing at the transparently obvious lies.  The joke is far more humorous when it’s no longer being played on you.

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