It's a funny story...or is it?

I have often said that I'm a card-carrying member of the "Nothing Sacred" school of humor. This isn't technically true, as there is no official school so named, nor do I actually carry any such membership card.
However, I like the idea of creating some cards, and giving them out to fellow members. It's kind of like the "school of life" or "school of hard knocks;" it may not be a real place, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from it.

The "Nothing Sacred" school of humor is built on a foundation of the following four rules:

1. Timing is everything. Any comedian will tell you this is true. If you tell a joke to quickly, too slowly, or even mess up the rhythm of the joke, its humor can be lost. You have then killed a perfectly good (or wonderfully bad) joke.

2. If you have to explain it, it's not funny. Have you ever told a joke, and it totally fell flat? No reaction from your audience, save the distant sound of crickets chirping and a lone tumbleweed drifting down a nearby road? Looks like that joke died, too. Don't try to resuscitate it by explaining why it's funny; you're just kicking the corpse. If you killed the joke, odds are it was lame anyway, and had to be put out of its misery. (Yes, I just compared jokes to horses. Ha! Beating a dead horse! Get it? Get it?)

3. Play to your audience. What is funny to one person may not be funny to another. A joke that gets full gut-laughs from your best friend may get a confused look from a family member, or may cause offense in someone you work with. Unemployment is rarely funny; even less so when it happens to you. With humor, one size definitely does not fit all.

4. Everything is fair game. George Carlin put it best when he said "I believe you can joke about anything; it's all in how you construct the joke." There is no topic you cannot turn into humor in some way or another. The trick is finding the right way to tell the joke, and the right person to tell it to. And don't let anybody censor you; that way lies the path of cutesy, milquetoast family fare that is only amusing to Ned Flanders. It's a slippery slope that has killed many comedic careers. Filter yourself, yes; but do not censor yourself. Either everything is acceptable to be joked about, or nothing is.

With these simple rules, it's not that hard to be funny. I'd like to get them printed up onto cards; then I could actually be a "card-carrying member."

A Rant About Ranting...

Dear LaRouche supporters:

Enough with the Hitler mustaches already.

I am asking this as nicely as I possibly can: please, please, PLEASE stop waving around posters with a Hitler mustache superimposed on the President’s face. I’m not just talking about President Obama, either. This is a completely non-partisan plea for sanity and reason. I don’t care if the ‘stache shows up on Obama, Bush or Millard Fillmore; it needs to stop.

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to stop comparing modern-day politicians to Adolf Hitler. Obama is not Hitler. Bush was not Hitler. They aren’t “The new Hitler,” “Hitler Lite,” “Diet Hitler” or even “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Hitler.” There are no more Hitlers, and there never will be again. The last surviving member of the family changed his name in 1947. The jersey has been retired. It’s OVER.

There are only three topics in which Hitler or the Nazi Party can be brought up logically: the history of Germany, World War II in general, and the suffering the Jewish people have endured for centuries. To bring comparisons to the Nazis in any other debate invokes Godwin’s Law: if you mention Hitler, you lose the argument. Period.

This is the same type of hyperbolic nonsense that has been spewed by extremists on every fringe of the political spectrum for nearly 70 years. Every tie-dyed, dreadlocked hippie demanding the legalization of every drug known to man; every Tea Party nut-job dressing up like a Revolutionary War-era Minuteman; every petulant teenager who was forbidden by his parents to go to an unsupervised rave at 1:30 in the morning on a Wednesday; they all will compare their opponents, or what they represent, to Nazi Germany.

When you show up on street corners with this kind of iconography, your credibility is immediately decimated. You will quickly be relegated to the status of “just another random lunatic,” and your message will be ignored, just as easily as we ignore the ramblings of someone in a tin-foil hat.

If you want to further a political candidate’s cause, the best way is to talk about the positive things that candidate has accomplished, and what he or she plans to do if elected. Nondescript ranting and raving, slogans that are offensive for the sake of being offensive and Nazi-themed Photoshop attacks become little more than white noise, and are dismissed just as easily.

I know that my plea for sensible, intelligent discourse may fall on deaf ears, but I have to hope that maybe someone will read this and realize, “You know, I’m not doing my cause any favors by using it to bludgeon people over the head.”

And besides: if reason doesn’t work, I could always get a paintball gun.