Barron YoungSmith is scraping the bottom of the barrel iin looking for way to criticize McCain.

Hey what about Obama? Is he a  misogynist? His joke about his granmother wasn't funny either.

what joke about his grandmother?

I like this sudden touchiness wrt to name-calling jackson, it's like a WHOLE NEW YOU dear!

The gorilla joke, 20 years old or not, was in incredibly bad taste, and not even funny.

But I laughed out loud for a long minute at the Chelsea/Reno line.

I'm always a bit surprised when people praise his sense of humour (that spelling is for you, icarus, if you're out there.) The only times I've seen him be very funny were on Letterman (doing the scripted "creepy guy" thing about Dave) and, less so, on SNL. When he cracks off-the-cuff jokes, they're often awkward or tasteless or mean-spirited. (Bomb bomb Iran? Cigarette exports being a way of killing Iranians? Sheesh.)

He's getting a long free ride from the press. Why aren't we hearing more about his blatant flip-flops, his repeated Czechoslovakia gaffes, etc?

scire,

He's babbling.

To be fair that joke is more than 20 years old, and it's been 15 or so years since he called his wife a trollop and a c-word in front of others. Maybe he's mellowed since then. Maybe that lobbyist he was having an affair with told him to knock off the women-bashing.

Flyboy humor.  I hate to say it, but I laughed at all of them and I love Reno AND Chelsea.  

mmathog, your obama darling has no sense of humor, not even a bad sense of humor.

That's untrue, Jackson. Did you ever hear his response to a question about whether Bill Clinton is considered a black president?

Well Jackson, I'm not sure what Obama's sense of humor (or perhaps lack thereof) has anything to do with McCain's disgusting misogynist joke, but whatever.

But actually, I think Obama does have a sense of humor. He cracked up over that 3 a.m. ad, 'I dunno, I'd like, answer the phone if it rang' and his dusting himself off from attacks was kinda funny. There's a 3rd example, very recently, sending up McCain on something, slips my mind...

Anyway, if you want to vote for comedian in chief, vote for Nader, he's on the ballot and his sense of humor is 10x either of these guys.

mmathog,

A 3rd example: "America already has a Dr. Phil."

Not possible.  Did McCain call a female reporter "sweetie"?  No.  As everyone knows, a misogynist (or sexist if you prefer) is a person who calls a female reporter "sweetie".  Men who receive oral sex from their interns or refer to their wives as cunts are not misogynists or sexists because they did not call a female reporter "sweetie".

Come on . . .you've got to go back to 1986 for something to chat about (can't call this 'reporting')>

Don't mind Jackson, he knows that electing McCain is the most efficient way to kill the most Ay-rabs, so he's not going to see anything wrong with his golden boy.

John McCain may be many admirable things but a comedian he is not. His humor reflects a by-gone, white male hegemonic era that wasn't very funny when it was in vogue. These days, it is just damn pathetic...

and I love old jackson and am glad to see his posts - the Spine which is where he usually sets up shop, has been curiously moribund lately - and having said that, old jackson would be the last person in the world who I would turn to for advice on humor....

now, if we're taking smarts, or literary erudition, or how to twist the shiv in the guts, well, jackson is your man. Jokes?  Naw....

I found the Reno/Chelsea joke to be as vile as the Limbaugh/Wihte House dog joke. The worst part about it is that McCain made that joke four years after Limbaugh was chastized for making his Chelsea joke.

Calling a young woman "ugly" is an incredibly asshole thing to do. Period. Someone who says such a thing doesn't have a lot of class. Furthermore, it isn't funny. Of course, neither is dropping the Seaword after calling your wife a trollop.

But hey, women who support McCain over Obama because of your misdirected anger and hurt feelings: You go right ahead and back the guy who makes rape jokes, calls little girls ugly and his wife a whore. His positions on abortion, a real issue unlike this joke stuff, those don't matter either. What matters is how mad you are!

I also liked his answer regarding the "biggest fault" question, when Hillary criticized him for having a messy desk.

"Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, 'What's your biggest weakness?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'"

That's a funny line.  

He can be wicked sarcastic. Something he said in Audacity of Hope [I think] - ok I found it,  "saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk" - context:

[from Audacity of Hope]

"And sometimes our ideological predispositions are just so fixed that we have trouble seeing the obvious.  Once, while still in the Illinois Senate, I listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers.  Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance.  I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their formative years too hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state. Despite my best efforts, the bill still went down in defeat; Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk (a version of the bill would later pass).  But my fellow legislator's speech helps underscore one of the differences between ideology and values:  Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question."

psantillana,

you forget, sarcasm is how the "elites" like their humor, satire is another, these types of humor the working class j"ust don't get".  McCain's a man of the people, crass, insensitive, and completely sexist, but still a man of the people.

we'll leave the sarcasm to people like John Stewart, David Letterman, and Stephen Colbert.  The wokring class like their comedy more broader, ala Larry the Cable Guy, Leno, or McCain I guess,

Seriously though, I like Obama self-deprecating humor better.  It seems to me that McCain's humor is not self-deprecating, is more mean-spirited and kinda petty.  

Yeah, lamh31, McCain is more macho fratboy. I hope that's yesterday's presidential style.