I hate to disagree with Krugman, but disagree I must. In a recent post on his blog he made the outrageous claim that the right can't take (or make?) a joke, and that we on the left can. The proximate cause of his post was the reaction to a humorous attack on Bitcoin, which provoked an angry response from the suckers who will, blessedly, soon lose all their money.
And it’s not just BitCoin. When I think about the various debates I’ve been engaged in over the past five years, what’s striking is how furious and huffy the other side gets when people like me use picturesque language to get a point across — “confidence fairy”, “zombie idea”, and so on. As in other matters, this is not symmetric. I get called a lot of names, but so what? The argument’s the thing.
Or maybe not, for some people. As the old lawyer’s line says, if the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if the law is on your side, pound the law; if neither are on your side, pound the table. I’d add: and demand “civility.”
In other words, I think that when one side in a debate lacks all sense of humor, and gets deeply offended when the other side cracks a joke, it’s an indicator of intellectual insecurity.
via The Conscience of a Liberal
How wrong he is, and how soon he forgets. Right wingers are always making jokes that we lefties don't get. For instance, just recently, Meghan Kelly joked about Santa Claus being white. We know it was a joke because she told us so herself, the day after she made it. Or consider Anne Coulter, one of the greatest right wing comedians of all time. (Actually I've chosen her because it's just so easy to find examples) Liberals can never see the humor in her remarks about, for example, Arabs, gays, or murdering political opponents despite the fact that she patiently explains that her comments were jokes.
Now in our defense, there are some differences between lefty jokes and right wing jokes. Our jokes are generally “funny” and we usually know we are joking as the words leave our mouths or pens. Right wing jokes have a sort of ex post facto quality; they tend to become jokes a day or two after they are emitted, generally at about the time the jokester starts to take some heat, or, when they themselves (poor Meghan again) become the butt of real time jokes of the funny variety.
Nonetheless, and in the interests of maintaining the “both sides do it” journalistic meme, I must again state that Krugman is dead wrong about the humorlessness of the right and about the ability of the left to take a joke. I plead guilty myself. I've always believed that I can understand a good joke, but try as I might I haven't summoned up so much of a chuckle as a result of Meghan's joke, though I'm sure it must be funny.
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