I don’t know why you’d want to be a columnist if you did not appreciate the humor in life. That doesn’t mean being hyper-partisan. You also want to see the comedy in your own side. I don’t like indignation - I don’t think it’s useful. It’s important to be funny about serious things.
The funny writers should be funny about war, famine, pestilence and disease, because it’s an important weapon in discussing those subjects. Someone asked the Ayotollah Khomeini about Islam’s attitude toward jokes, and he said, ‘There are no jokes in Islam.’ We should use jokes to our advantage. Find the comedy in a situation, because that is a good way to change people’s minds on it.
But before I got there, this caught my eye: an interview with Lynndie England in which she confesses
those pictures were shameful and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government," she said, according to the report. "And I feel sorry and wrong about what I did.But also thinks the media were wrong to splash the pictures all over the front pages, raising jihadist indignation and costing lives. So, speaking of finding the comedy in a situation, I love this line:
Asked how she could blame the media for the controversy...Indeed, who could blame the media for anything? Snort!
