Tag: humor

Kyle Gass

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Someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump as he gave a speech in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania last Saturday. The shooter missed by centimeters, only grazing Trump’s ear. Three other people were shot, however, one fatally. The iconic image of Trump raising his fist in defiance is the stuff memes are made of. It was an emotional event.

In the days since, some Right-wingers have been trying to “cancel” those liberals who have made light of the event, or more commonly lamenting that the assassin did not succeed. The first such major example involved the Gen-X musical comedy duo Tenacious D. (more…)

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Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

In the first two parts of this series we highlighted the power of humor and/or embarrassment in determining the course of human events — sometimes blatantly and swiftly, as during the Battle of the Yarmuk, and sometimes subtly and slowly, as with Leftism/wokeism’s long march through our institutions and culture. (more…)

Ilya Yefimovitch Repin, The Zaporozhye Cossacks Write a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan, 1880-81

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Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

As I hope I’ve shown in the first part of this series, embarrassment and/or humor are operative with virtually all people under all circumstances. The heart of clown world in the present is no exception; indeed, these elements played a big part in bringing our mad, mad world about, as I can attest from personal experience, having been in high school during the early years of the Global War on Terror and the ironically-named USA PATRIOT Act that gave it teeth. (more…)

Catalan depiction of the Battle of the Yarmuk from the fourteenth century.

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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

There is an unfortunate bias on the dissident Right in general toward focusing their efforts and techniques on logic in the narrower sense: that is, on calmly and methodically pointing out the internal contradictions and illogic of the enemy’s ideology and arguments. (more…)

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We all know that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But does it follow that when you understand the culture of critique, every Jew looks hostile? Of course not, but, boy, it’s kind of tempting to think that way, isn’t it?

I think Tobias Langdon might have given in to that temptation a little bit in his engrossing essay “The Spinal Solution.” (more…)

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When the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli received an anonymous solution to a difficult problem he’d set in 1696, he saw at once who had sent it. The solver was Isaac Newton, he said, because he knew ex ungue leonem — “the lion by his claw.” (more…)

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Milan Kundera, trans. Michael Henry Heim
The Joke
New York: Harper, 1993 (1967)

Write it on a postcard.
Dad, they broke me.

— Pavement, “Stop Breathing” (more…)

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When I first said I wanted to be a comedian, everyone laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.

— Bob Monkhouse 

If you and your friends were to have a séance, and you channeled the spirit of George Orwell, the greatest Englishman never to appear on a banknote would use the glass to tap out the following: stop quoting 1984. (more…)

August 1977 cover of Instauration

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In February, I wrote a two-part article on Instauration after poring over the 25-year archive of the venerable newsletter. I included what I felt were some choice nuggets of wisdom from a publication bursting with profound insights into our situation as a race. One thing I had forgotten was how funny the readers and writers of Instauration could be. (more…)

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So, did you hear the one about the Jewish comedian?

The joke I am about to tell is probably the most sophisticated joke I have ever heard. It is so breathtakingly multifaceted, that it may even lose some of its humor as its punch line keeps bouncing in the squash court of your mind (more…)

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Sometime in the early 2000s, the retail chain Urban Outfitters began selling a board game based on a Hasbro classic, called Ghettopoly. The box cover, made to look like a hoodlum had graffiti-painted its title across an alley wall, also featured a black “gangsta” holding a bottle of ‘shine in one paw and a gun loaded with an extra magazine (more…)

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This morning I woke up to the news of another casualty in the culture war. A dusty, 20-year-old skit of late-night comedian and SNL alum Jimmy Fallon donning brown makeup and a wig to mimic African racial features, in a Chris Rock impersonation, went viral. And just like clockwork, Fallon is on Twitter performing the self-flagellation ritual that is demanded of him by the anti-racism Sanhedrin.  (more…)

There’s a lot going on in this cover.

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Rainbow Albrecht
Space Vixen Trek Episode 17: Tomorrow the Stars
Smashwords, 2018

“Think of how well things have been going for America over the last two decades. So by 2008, unemployment and poverty surely will exist only in history books. With all the money available for research budgets by then, we’ll probably get technological miracles like antigravity propulsion sooner than expected.” (more…)