March 21, 2004

Too much ready-made humor. Dawn of the Dead has defeated The Passion of The Christ at the boxoffice this weekend. The potential for jokes in bad taste about rising from the dead is disturbing. Would Letterman or Leno go for the ready-made joke here? There's a line in comedy here: some comics would cross it and some wouldn't. Will Jon Stewart? My guess is that he'll have a carefully crafted witticism on tomorrow's Daily Show.

Another source of ready-made humor this week is Justice Scalia's memo declining to recuse himself after duck-hunting with VP Cheney. There has always been something funny about ducks: the way they look, the way they sound, the word their name rhymes with. The Marx Brothers knew it: Why a Duck? Duck Soup. But Scalia's memo also has the line: ""I never hunted in the same blind as the vice president." So duck blind ... justice is blind ... the Justice is blind ... C'mon! There's a joke here. Here's Maureen Dowd's attempt to pull the seemingly ready-made joke out of that:
No need for justice to be blind when the blinds are just.

Huh? Here's Art Buchwald pointlessly flailing at the material. Enough!

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