Funny Times, May 2010

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 22 May 2010:

It’s always been my habit to go to ground during the summers, so it isn’t much of a surprise that I’ve fallen behind in my “Periodicals Notes.” Not that anyone has complained, but I’ll be catching up a bit over the next few days. First up is May’s Funny Times.

There’s an installment of Lloyd Dangle’s Troubletown that I thought was hilarious when it first appeared back in February. It’s about the political movement known as the “teabaggers,” Americans of a rightward bent who have been vocal about their opposition to the Obama administration. Dangle is mystified that the teabaggers have been the object of so much publicity. My favorite line from the comic is “600 people showed up for their convention. That’s almost as many as the Sheboygan High School science fair!”

Matt Bors has a good comic about privacy, I was reminded of it by this recent xkcd.

Jon Winokur’s “Curmudgeon” compiles quotes about money, including this from Brigid Brophy: “Whenever people say, ‘We mustn’t be sentimental,’ you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, ‘We must be realistic,’ they mean they are going to make money out of it.” Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but she does have a point. So did Mary Gordon, when she wrote: “The use of money is the purest act of faith; no anchorite who has followed a vision into the desert has acted on an idea as far-fetched as our belief that if we put a dollar in a machine we will be drinking a Diet Coke in a minute.” Andrea Dworkin is a name you don’t expect to encounter in a humor column, but she’s here: “Money talks, but it speaks with a male voice.” Given Dworkin’s personal history as a woman who was once forced into sex work to escape an abusive partner, I can’t imagine laughing at that line, but I can certainly take it seriously.

Some would say that laughter is the ultimate form of seriousness. If so, Dave Maleckar’s “Hundred Word Rant” may have hit on a way to take sex work seriously. Arguing that people who like to cook should not open restaurants, he concludes thus: “You probably like sex, too. You may be very good at it. That doesn’t mean you should start doing it for money.”