Sarah and her Lesbian Niece

It's really great finding a clip of a comedian at her peak and getting the chance to see her do one of those near perfect acts where every line is perfectly weighted, perfectly sharpened - the line is often long passed before you see how deeply you've been slit. In this case, there's an added bonus. The audience really doesn't seem to like her very much; it's a very generous audience, you can tell that much, but they're not really that keen. For most of the video, I'm wondering if they detest her or simply don't get her. Still, there's a gorgeously horrible moment towards the end when the audience is finally coming around and they really get hooked.



An alert member of the elite readers of this blog sent me this link to a paper, "What makes humour aesthetic?"

I'm not going to lie, I'm not going to make idiots of you, I'm not going to take you on a ride on my spangled unicycle down stupid lane . . . I only skimmed this paper. Barely. I haven't studied it deeply, I am not presenting you with a comprehensive rebuttal, I'm not hitching you on a spangled unicycle and taking you down brilliant analysis lane.

The Yankee Fan with the Golden Gun

@stevenpoole asked a really good question:

What exactly is the "news value" of a picture of a dead body that is not already contained in the information that said person is dead?

Do such images add "news value" to descriptions like:

In a cellphone video that went viral on the Internet, the deposed Libyan leader is seen splayed on the hood of a truck and then stumbling amid a frenzied crowd, seemingly begging for mercy. He is next seen on the ground, with fighters grabbing his hair. Blood pours down his head, drenching his golden brown khakis, as the crowd shouts, “God is great!”

When the news first came out about Gaddafi's execution, the photographs and video images did - not despite, but as evidence for, the analyses of Barthes and Sontag - provide a sense of confirmation, but this sense of confirmation may be adding something other than what I would understand by "news value"; its value lies elsewhere.

DIalects

An alert reader directed me to this, a wonderful example about the uses and abuses of language, with a very amusing core question: were they joking when they insisted that 'punani' was a "sandwich sold locally and is made of Italian bread with cheese and tomato which is heated up"? One has to admire the several conceits in the line - the notion that it is a local custom, the concession to tenuous Italian origins in Italian bread, and the culinary explanation that it is heated up, all in all displaying a lovely ignorance of panini. Comedy is a wonderful guise for innocence, through uncertainly brilliant relays of stupidity, gullibility, and distraction.

Say what?

Not having bothered to blog in a while (during which time, this blog escaped and went feral, submitting posts under its own name on bizarre astronomical and eskimo-porn web-sites; I wrangled it back this morning with the promise of cookies, and then subdued it with a benzodiazapene-spiced cracker), I had no real inclination to blog today. If I didn't have anything to say, why say it?

That was obviously not the motivating question for the syndicated cartoonists in the Sunday Newspapers, who today banded together for the first time since they met up during lunchbreak in the maths classroom, played Dungeons and Dragons, and wondered what girls were, a few dozen years ago. And that includes the girls. Anyway, they put out a collective commemoration, in which they pretty much had nothing to say, and said it en masse.

Summer in the City and in the Country

My guess is that Michael Billington has made no secret throughout his career of aspiring to be one of those "national treasures" - public figures who are too prickly or intellectual to have been considered attractive in their early years but who, in their dotage, are generally treated in the media as though they are widely loved - and has cultivated a persona greatly attuned to achieving this status: never too supportive of the avant-garde to suggest radicalism and conservatively disappointed in the art of today, but with a few gentle foibles and preferences suggestive of taste; a generally anti-nationalist, belligerently anti-racist position with just the right touch of xenophobic snapping and loyal patriotism; grumpy enough to make the establishment suspect he really is a closet Tory.

An alert reader directed me to his latest postprandial belch, a review of Much Ado About Nothing. I think the ending rather proves the point I was making above:

But a carnivalesque evening would be better for a touch of self-restraint. In some theatres, actors play to the gallery. Here, they are in thrall to the groundlings.

Well, la di da. Fuck the groundlings! And that's just what impressed Bakhtin about the carnivalesque, isn't it? Its restraint.

But of course, it is the beginning of Billington's review that had the alert reader's steaming to such an extent - well, I'll tell you a little secret: this alert reader woke me up to tell me about this review. Yes, it's true. I sleep with my readers. Not all of you, though. But you should know it's at least possible. In any case, this alert reader was fuming about the following:

On a chill, damp night Jeremy Herrin's production, pre-empting next week's West End version (starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate) conquered its audience. But, although Herrin's production is full of intelligent touches and neatly blends Shakespeare's Messina and Morocco, I found it hard to surrender completely to a show that contains more mugging than you'll find in Central Park on a Saturday night.

Graciously, we might think that Billington is making an in-joke for his New York audience, referring to (and mocking, but perhaps affectionately) the several free productions of Shakespeare in Central Park every Summer: the Public's two productions (this year, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well) at the Delacorte nestled above Turtle Pond in the centre of the park, and the New York Classical Theatre's productions around the pond at 100th. There is quite a lot of mugging in open air theatre and there's a lot of that going on on any Saturday night in the Summer in Central Park.

(image from newyorkclassical.org)

Less graciously, if we suspect he is not referring to the theatrical events in Central Park, we might think it rather odd that the theatre critic for The Guardian hasn't visited New York in over thirty years. And less graciously still, if he has visited New York once or twice since the Ford years, we might wonder about the cultural clumsiness and comic clod-handedness that would have him blurble this sub-sub-Anthony-Lane gag and like it enough not to edit it out. As the alert reader said, it's obvious that he really, really loves his line. In fact, taking a cue from his own sentence, one might say that he surrendered easily to a comic mugging by a bad line.

Speaking of newspapers, I thought I'd share this touchingly and oddly relevant scene from Brideshead Revisited:

Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in a conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, but I took it as a foible, like his Teddy-bear. We never discussed the matter until on the second Sunday at Brideshead . . . he surprised me by saying: "Oh dear, it's very difficult being a Catholic."

"Does it make much difference to you?"
"Of course. All the time."

"Well, I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don't seem much more virtuous than me."

"I'm very, very much wickeder," said Sebastian indignantly.

"Well then?"

"Who was it who used to pray, 'Oh God, make me good, but not yet'?"

"I don't know. You, I should think."

"Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn't that." He turned back to the pages of the News of the World and said, "Another naughty scout-master."

Brilliant stuff.

Your Daily Llama

Here's a joke going wrong. An Australian TV anchor, or, as I like to call them, a TV deadweight, is interviewing the Dalai Lama and tells a joke his son told him: So the Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop . . . and says, "Can you make me one with everything?"

The Dalai Lama, pleading for help from his interpreter, waits for the punchline . . . after the anchor has delivered it. The anchor cracks up, acutely aware that the joke has plummeted from the heights of comic nirvana into the material rocks far below, where it fractures into a thousand unblessed coughs of embarrassment.

The bit I really love is when the two men face each other, quite kindly and sweetly, and the Australian anchor says "Do you know I mean?" It's a very human moment because clearly the Dalai Lama has no idea what he means.

Anway, with the professionally self-effacing charm of benign morning television "hosts", the anchor goes on to explain what the joke means, making use of some cringeworthy mime. The Dalai Lama, perhaps sort of guessing the meaning of the joke and certainly understanding the question, then seems to say, "Theoretically impossible."

Theoretically impossible? But not . . . practically impossible?

What does he mean? Does he mean that it is theoretically impossible to be at one with everything or that it is theoretically impossible for the surly, gum-smacking kid behind the counter at your local pizzeria to make you (at) one with everything? Or is that the Dalai Lama finds it theoretically impossible that he would order a pizza that, including everything, would be loaded with pepperoni, beef, sausage and anchovies?

Obviously, hating on the Dalai Lama would be like urinating on the baby Jesus in his manger, murdering the shepherds, buggering their flocks of sheep, and then lying in wait for the Three Kings to steal their gold, frankincense and myrrh; it's not something one does. And surely this good-spirited encounter doesn't deserve to be analysed as anything other than a pleasant encounter rife with misunderstanding resulting from difficulties in translation?

But I think something quite interesting happened: we get to watch the combined failure of the comic and the spiritual, with the resurrection of the former but not the latter.

The failure of comedy can be comic, because failure can be amusing; there is, in comedy, no theoretical impossibility either in content or in practice. A comic narrative may involve the suspension of disbelief but that is, quite precisely, refusing to countenance theoretical impossibility; and because the failure of comedy can be comic, as we see in this example (in varying degrees: the anchor's laughter is one type of laughter at the failure of his comedy, but our laughter at him, and at his laughter, may be another), there is no end to comedy: the final moment, the human teleological last gasp, however dramatic, however pitiable, could still be funny.

But for a theological figure to denounce the theoretical possibility of something is absurd; a day's-worth of oil that can burn for eight days, turning water into wine, being the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of compassion - theoretically impossible! Now, before you use those mad assassin moves you learned during your retreat in Dharamsala and, prior to jabbing your little finger into my lifebutton, I will concede that, of course, the Dalai Lama might be right in saying that it is "theoretically impossible" to be at one with everything, in just the same way that a Christian who believes that God bestowed divine wisdom on George W. Bush could say it is "theoretically impossible" for the Dalai Lama to go to heaven. But this "theoretically impossible" is only a tautology: Here's my theory; whatever is exterior to it is "theoretically impossible". That is not actually a pronouncement on actual theoretical possibility but is an arbitrary reification of arbitrary theological convention. As such, it is an act of theological force, a demonstration of power, not an assessment of what is or is not theoretically possible.

To respond to a joke that some part of it is not "theoretically possible" is to fail to get the joke; in the examples above of what might have been "theoretically impossible", we have at least three potential impossibilities. I'm not daintily lambasting the Dalai Lama for failing to get the joke per se; but I don't want to let him off the hook for what he actually did say just because he is so benign.

To resort to "theoretically impossible" in a comic context is to refuse (or fail) to get the joke, but comedy can spin out of this failure; to resort to "theoretically impossible" in a spiritual context is to apply the conventions of the intellect to the mystery of the spiritual, which is not just putting lipstick on a pig, it's adding pearl earrings and a dress, and then taking the pig to the prom and then being surprised when you don't win "cutest couple".

Burlesqoni

In last week's New Yorker, there was an article about Silvio Berlusconi, which has all the qualities of journalistic sex tourism without any of the guilt: it's deliciously voyeuristic and titillating, but the target is a rich vulgar world leader. Similar issues were covered by Zizek in his LRB piece two years ago. How does the buffoon, the clown rise to power? Zizek did not cite Foucault, although Foucault addresses this passingly, as you well know, in his Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975: Abnormal. Playing the clown is not merely a populist tactic to appeal to the man-on-the-street and a refutation of a presumed hierarchy; it is a disabling power play.

Few people have mastered this role as well as Berlusconi, who has bulldozed his way to the top with (please stop reading this if you live in a country with strict libel laws) all sorts of flagrant, rambunctious, phallic spectacles of greed and criminality in the tradition of some of Rome's greatest, and worst, rulers, a vivacious spectacle that governs in part through the suppressive effects of the vivacious spectacle itself. (Those of you living in countries with strict libel laws can start reading again.) In the New Yorker article, we get one of Berlusconi's rambunctious, phallic jokes:

Berlusconi has been far from contrite. A week before the opening of the Rubygate trial [on charges of prostitution with a minor and abuse of power], he travelled to Lampedusa, a tiny island off the coast of Sicily where tens of thousands of North African refugees have come ashore in the past few months. He told the crowd assembled there, “Did you hear the latest poll? They asked women between twenty and thirty years old if they want to make love to Berlusconi. Thirty-three per cent said yes! Sixty-seven per cent said ‘Again?’”

The poll must have taken place in Italy, because if it had been anywhere else Berlusconi would have been competing with my friends, who have the 20-30 female demographic in the rest of Europe and North America well covered.

Now, on the one hand, this joke is pure bravado: he's laying claim to the accusation of philandering hurled against him; he's mastering the charge, owning it, toying with it and playing with it. It is, in the parlance of the 1990s, appropriation. In effect, he's saying that he is being accused of a moral crime, and by insisting that he is guilty as charged, he's refusing to see the crime as a crime at all. The joke functions by creating a certain expectation and then shattering it not just with its opposite but with a wry allusion to the opposite: if 33% say "yes", we'd expect a typical poll to go on to report that some higher percentage say "no" and some smaller percentage have "no opinion"; instead we get the wonderfully ambivalent "again?"

"Again?" is a lovely little concession to ambiguity, and gives the joke some of its aesthetic impact: "again?" could be perkily expectant but it could also be wearily resigned. Berlusconi repudiates any concern for the charge of philandering and promiscuity, he embodies machismo in a country where, according to the New Yorker, 95% of men have never operated a washing machine (the other 5% are porn stars who play washing machine repairmen); but he allows a tone of ambiguity to appear in the majority female voice with "Again?" I'm definitely not arguing that this makes the joke a feminist one. But I'm going to come back to this.

So, also within the joke, is a lovely attack on the media-political apparatus working against him: the irrelevance of polls on topics like this and the failure of his opponents to realise how much women actually love him (for surely the expected implication of such a poll would be that, first of all, the poll question is of some importance, and, second, that it would uncover resentment). Put another way: the joke trivialises polls not by caricaturing them but by basing the joke on what could be a very real poll, demonstrating how risible they are; taken a step further, the irrelevance of polls and the typically banal divisions they uncover are saved by Berlusconi, whose vivacious populism can surmount the chattering, chittering pseudointellectualism of the politcal-media classes. (And this is not in any way contradictory because Berlusconi is also the leader of the political-media class; the clown and the buffoon can play both roles, as we saw so clearly in the figure of George W. Bush who converted blue blood into soda pop).

And, on the other hand, we can see the joke do some really dirty work. Vonnegut talks about how jokes relieve you from the burden of thinking: the punchline comes in and rescues you. You might hesitate over the precision of Berlusconi's demographic in the joke, "Women aged 20-30", which excludes those on the cusp of adulthood and certainly excludes minors, even though the whole scandal revolves around whether Berlusconi has been so carefully selective on the age of his paramours; you might wonder whether "make love" is implying the most romantic, generous, and emotional encounter (indeed, he re-moralises the debate on his own terms: he's not rutting or fucking, he's not exploiting, he's making love). And, of course, he does not release ambiguity in "Again?", he captures it, trades in it, makes it subservient to his masculinity; the possibly resistant female voice he pretends to echo, the intimation of ambiguity in the ersatz poll, is rendered grotesque, in just the same way that Berlusconi does not empower women but makes them grotesque even when they are given power.

Remembering Foucault:

Political power, at least, in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, and has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and, even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous. [snippety-snip] The grotesque is one of the essential processes of arbitrary sovereignity. But you know also that the grotesque is a process inherent to assiduous bureaucracy. [snippety-snip: Foucault mentions Balzac, Dostoevsky, Courteline and Kafka] And what I say about the Roman Empire, what I say about modern bureaucracy, could also be said about many other mechanical forms of power, such as Nazism or Fascism. The grotesque character of someone like Mussolini was absolutely inherent to the mechanism of power. Power provided itself with an image in which power derived from someone who was theatrically got up and depicted as a clown and buffooon.

This is not, Foucault says, a ritualistic process of "limiting its effects and of magically dethroning the person" in power, as if it is a democratising of power, humbling it in the figure of the goofball to whom the man-on-the-street can relate.

Rather, it seems to me to be a way of giving a striking form of expression to the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigour and at the extreme point of its rationality even when in the hands of someone who is effectively discredited.

The notion that comedy is fundamentally heroic, on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor, is sentimental and dangerous.

Conviction

Of course, that wasn't my last post ever. Although nobody was rude enough to say it out loud, my entire readership was very upset and annoyed with me for threatening to leave this blog behind, and I know that had I left it any longer, the e-mails and tweets would have started coming in, begging me to start it back up again. Thus, this post is about conviction, as in "having conviction", believing in what you do and say.

Here's an opening line from a recent editorial:

Since the shooting rampage in Tucson on Jan. 8 that killed six and wounded 13 (including Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford), there has been intensified rhetoric urging Americans to arm themselves and to carry guns for protection

I should not have been astounded that in the United States a sentence beginning with a list of casualties from gun violence would end with an evocation of "intensified rhetoric" urging people to buy more guns. Now, mind you, the writer is not endorsing the NRA's point of view and he goes on to make points I myself would make if I were half as articulate and had a bully pulpit (and, I assure you, I will never turn private matters and public things into a bully pulpit; objectivity rules the day on this site).

No, it's the voluminous, heavy-swinging cajones of various groups on the American right that have me dismayed; their power over the national discourse, the way their words - "to arm themselves" - and their logic - "to carry guns for protection" - can infiltrate even their opponents' language, is something to behold. It's not a matter of integrity or intellectualism, it's sheer conviction. They believe it so hard, it becomes true.

It got me to thinking about editorial cartooning.

Editorial cartooning somehow survived the mockery of Brass Eye; the long tradition of using caricature - elephantine ears, stalactite noses, pebbly eyes - and a few words inscribed into a drawing to make a convincing case for an argument about current political affairs lives on today. All over the place. You can't spit at a newspaper without hitting an editorial cartoon. Of course, an editorial cartoon can make a powerful point with all the majestic impact of Zidane's bulldozer head, or it can simplify a complex situation into a crude lie; an editorial cartoon can be Hogarthian art about human folly, or it can be frank propaganda spewed out by the machine.

Here are a selection of editorial cartoons about a recent topic in the news. The first is by Steve Bell in The Guardian. The last is by Brian Fairrington.

Now, I'm particularly interested in the percentage one by Fairrington. Ostensibly, the argument is being made that George W. Bush deserves the credit for the very brief capture of Osama bin Laden: for his years of painstaking work behind the scenes, for his leadership and his vision, for bearing the brunt of the public's ire even as he steeled himself with resolve to do what he had to do, opinion polls be damned; Obama is just a late-comer, profiting from his predecessor's hard work and sacrifice.

An editorial cartoon is a model of efficiency, condensing a roomful of fog into a few pure drops of insight. But what is being left out by such an argument, if indeed Fairrington is making that argument? What has been excluded as the cartoonist sought to condense the history of the American search for bin Laden over the past decades into a single drop? Oh, I don't know: the war in Iraq; letting bin Laden escape Tora Bora; closing the bin Laden C.I.A. unit; Bush not worrying so much about where bin Laden is; the utterly confusing and misleading """information""" procured from torture, which may well have contributed to bin Laden's safety. Not to mention Obama's own contributions, the decisions he made, and so forth. And, if this is the argument being made, how can we not imagine a very similar cartoon with a picture of the U.S. Economy in place of bin Laden's - everything else would be the same. But Fairrington, who's done a lot of cartoons about the U.S. Economy, such as here and here, might not agree?

After all, what we're talking about is a cartoonist's assessment of responsibility; and what if this is about responsibility as culpability? Isn't it possible that this same bullet-through-Osama's-head cartoon could be appended to an editorial about American acceptance of extra-legal, illegal, extra-moral, immoral devices, techniques, practices and policies, to show how Obama is continuing what Bush started? (After all, surely if this were only about responsibility for nabbing the old goat-fucked terrorist, Bill Clinton would earn a few percentage points?)

Similarly, laying out bin Laden's corpse as the "i" in Justice, with its own poetic reverberations of an "eye for an eye", an "i" for an "i", a life for a life, speaking also to the impossibility of measuring the extinction of Osama's subjectivity against the extinction of thousands of his victims' subjectivities, could be read quite differently: a murder has intruded upon justice, or has been claimed by "justice".

What about Steve Bell's Tessiobama? Are we supposed to see it as an image of old-school White House gangsterism? But even if we do see it that way, as something outside the law and murderous, how hard is it not to feel implicitly sympathetic? After all, I may not approve of the Corleones, but I admire them more than I admire anybody else who has ever lived. Hell, I wouldn't mind setting Clemenza on a few peoples' asses; I wouldn't be averse to sending Luca Brasi to deal with Mugabe, or getting Willi Cicci to sort out a few genocidaires:

And so I've been perturbed by the confluence of ambiguity and conviction in editorial cartooning. However convinced we may be by a joke's conviction, a joke is never enough to indict. Think of that the next time you read some pained piece by offended parties centring their victimhood on a joke at their expense.

But I'm still trying to figure another cartoon out. It's by Fairrington again. Fairrington has had a cartoon about how left wing MSNBC is; he produces one of those annual regular-as-clockwork-it's-winter-so-it's-time-to-do-a-global-warming cartoon; he does standard issue NRA, and pro-torture, and Clinton cartoons:

All in all, your everyday right wing bullshitter. Or is he?

Would someone explain this to me?

(Update, prior to posting: see below cartoon for my thoughts)

So, linger with that cartoon for a minute.

What does it mean?

Okay, so when I first saw this cartoon, I thought it was to be understood as follows: we all know that one reason why the "gays in the military" debate is such a charade is because there are already gays in the military; and one of the most poignant arguments against the charade is that gays in the military have died in the military, just like straight soldiers. I thought this cartoon was a tribute to these men and women, specifically showing a proud, fallen gay soldier calling out to his gay brethren to thank them for repealing what had kept him silent in life.

And then I thought, hold on. Holy Shit. That viewpoint would be very inconsistent with Fairrington's oeuvre. Maybe this cartoon means quite the opposite. It could be a depiction of a (presumably) straight soldier who has been killed because they let gays (come out) in the military, who is sarcastically sneering from beyond the grave at the gays who insisted that gays be allowed (to come out) in the military.

So, which do you think it is?

Win Ben Stein's Sexist Joke

You may have seen this? Ben Stein, most famous for an excellent, nay classic, cameo in the delightful John Hughes paean to post-pubescent fantasies of escape, and who has remained in the public eye ever since largely for being one of those Right Wing celebrities who see themselves as modern-day Quentin Crisps, risking life and limb by outing themselves in a world genocidally hostile to rich, white conservative men, got pre-emptively fired from a corporate gig for a sexist joke. Salon doesn't give us many details of this joke, because, gleaning what I can from another report, nobody has actually written down what those jokes were. However, the other report, from Bloomberg (which, as they admit, used to pay Ben Stein to write for them?) gives us a hint of the jokes, and Stein's response.


Over at Salon, they make the point that perhaps it's a shame this man is losing a gig at a Citigroup shindig for a sexist joke and not for being a corrupt, lying, corporate whore. Yeah, I know; I kind of agree. It's like getting Al Capone for tax evasion, or NPR tripping over its own laces firing Juan Williams for foxholing anti-Muslim bigotry and not decades of numbskull "analysis" and milquetoasty faux liberalism. Oh, and apparently Citigroup is already facing a big sexual harrassment lawsuit? But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about what we know about the jokes, and Stein's response.


Here's what we know:

Villarreal’s e-mail to Orszag told of three jokes at the Dallas conference she said were disparaging to women. One joke was about a wealthy man, his wife and his mistress, she said.

Another involved a female airline passenger who, realizing the flight is about to crash, takes off her clothes and asks if there is a man aboard who will “make me feel like a woman,” according to Villarreal’s e-mail, which was also sent to Bloomberg News. A cowboy in a hat removes his shirt, hands it to the woman, tells her to iron it and fetch him a beer.

Villarreal said the jokes she sent to Citigroup were versions found on the Internet based on her recollection of what Stein said.

Okay. So the first joke involves a wealthy man, his wife, and his mistress. Is it sexist? Based on what fractionally little evidence we have, it certainly smacks of sexism: after all, it is already like one of those eighteenth century tombstones that features identifying characters of the man and then all the women are described only in relation to him. He's a "wealthy man", the other two characters are "his", and are described in terms of their sexual obligations to him. But, frankly, that's not exactly enough to pass much of a judgement on the joke.


The next joke is . . . hold on, I skipped ahead: there's no third joke, and we're told that the offended party sent internet versions of the jokes she thinks she heard? Given that any single word can quite substantially alter how we understand a joke, I'd say that we're not working with very compelling evidence here.


Still, we have Stein's response:

Stein, who has written columns for Bloomberg News and appeared as a guest on Bloomberg Television, said in the interview that the joke targeted the man, not the woman, and that in his Dallas telling the woman didn’t remove clothing.

“It’s usually a joke understood to be making fun of a kind of cloddish, dopey guy,” Stein said. “When I was finished with this speech, dozens of women in the room came up to me and wanted their pictures taken with me, wanted autographs from me. Dozens of them. I got fan mail from women who had been at the group saying how much they liked the speech.”

The jokes are not original, he said.

“Every one of those jokes are thoroughly vetted with my wife,” said Stein.

Jesus Christ. What the hell are we supposed to do with this? The joke's at the expense of the man, not the woman? Really? Maybe? And presumably when he says the jokes aren't original, he means that they didn't originate with him, he didn't create them, write them, think them up. Still, it's a little bit embarrassing to be a professional corporate wag, essentially known as a humourist, and to be telling old jokes? Of course, one of the cool things about jokes is that so many of them are transmitted so quickly that authorship is soon lost. But even so, is this any sort of defence? Original authorship may be lost, but there's still some responsibility for re-telling the joke? And then he testifies with a rather depressing version of "my best friend is black", pulling his wife into the dock beside him in the hopes that proximity to her is exculpatory. (The rest of the article involves other rather vague and creepy assertions of how much good Ben Stein has done for women).


So, I am not officially a lawyer, I didn't go to law school or read case law or any of that stuff, but basically, to the extent that anybody has the right to claim to be a lawyer, I have that right. And I practice in the British system, which means that I prosecute and defend at the same time. I know. A peculiar system. So here is my summation:


"Your Grace, thank you for this opportunity to speak in the case of The Crown versus Ben Stein. As your Lordship knows, what we have here is failure to communicate. Mr Stein, who cannot be a sexist, because he has received fan mail from women (please note the plural: at least two women), and because he is married, is purported by the prosecution witness to have told jokes similar to ones found on the internet (what's that, your Honour? Oh, the internet - a newfangled technological device which allows near-instant communication, sort of like a typewriter-cum-telephone? Yes, it's most wonderful.) As I was saying, the jokes that approximate the ones told by Mr Stein are highly suspicious. To put it to you, your Grace, in a way you might understand: imagine a youth skulking around the sweets section of a newsagent with his hands jammed into his urban clothes, his mouth sticky, and his breath sugary. You might not have caught him stealing any sweets, but you'd be right to give him an ASBO. Now I Wanda - I mean, I wonder if we can fulfill our duty to the Crown as both defence and prosecution without knowing what the jokes were and how they were told? We must therefore find him - before I finish, may I just say how lovely you're looking today? It's such a relief to be in the presence of a Magistrate who takes such care over his appearance. No, you're very welcome, it's my honour. As I was saying, we must therefore find Mr Stein - excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt myself again, but is that Comme des Garçon? It is? I thought so. Lovely. Now, regarding Mr Stein, I think my case has been made. Good day to you all and, if I may add: three hurrahs for Will and Kate! Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah!"