Posted on 06/07/2004 3:02:48 PM PDT by Dont Mention the War
URL: http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/insight/article/0,1713,BDC_2494_2939137,00.html
My column didn't appear in last Sunday's Daily Camera. I wrote it. But my editors chose not to run it. This happens only rarely, but nobody likes getting their work yanked. So when you see that I'm not here, it isn't always because I'm too hung-over to write.
Of course it is an editor's prerogative to 86 anything he doesn't want in his paper. Some even think that's his job. And I, along with you, have been amazed that I haven't been given the pink slip a long time ago.
The offending column was yet another one of my sophomoric and meandering pieces taking pot shots at Boulder's goofiness. I thought it was cute. They didn't. Good chance they were right. If you can't live without reading it, it's at www.IndependenceInstitute.org.
Getting the column pulled gave me a flashback of when I was just out of college. I drew a comic strip back then. It was my dream to make my living by being a nationally syndicated cartoonist. And I got pretty damn close too.
I self-syndicated my strip "B Street" to nearly 50 newspapers around the country. It was just enough to keep myself in poverty.
I was destined to become an incredible cartooning success, until I hit a couple of small snags. Namely I couldn't draw, couldn't spell and wasn't funny. (Yes, I know, nothing's changed.)
There was another little problem. I was a conservative, and "B Street" showed it. I wanted it be a free-market answer to leftist strips like "Doonesbury" or "Bloom County," which, by the way, was the comic best strip ever.
For every newspaper I got into, it seemed that another would drop me for being inflammatory or insensitive or too political.
It would always go something like this: In one strip I drew a character, a compulsive over eater, who attacked a Ding Dong which tempted him by saying, "And me with my wrapper half off." I didn't know I was promoting date rape until a newspaper dropped me.
One of my favorites was getting pulled by one college paper after pressure from an African-American trustee who thought the term "black humor" was racist. Not that I used the term inappropriately in the strip. He just thought the words were racist.
It didn't take long to see that liberals bashing conservatives is funny. But conservatives bashing liberals is apparently just plain mean or insensitive.
There is a humor double-standard. Of course if you are a liberal, the response might be, "That's only because conservatives aren't funny." But funny, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and conservatives simply aren't allowed the same space.
"Doonesbury" is political satire to the point of being a pure left-wing editorial (take last week's listing of Iraq war dead). Yet it's graced the family-oriented funny pages for 35 years. The only counter to likes "Doonesbury," "Rudy Park" and "The Boondocks" is the mild (to the point of being lame) "Mallard Fillmore" which most papers carry on the editorial page, not on the funny pages. What gives?
Saturday Night Live rips the right, and they're funny. (If you think SNL is an equal-opportunity basher, watch "Weekend Update" and write down the score.) The Daily Show rips Republicans, and they're funny. Editorial cartoonists are overwhelmingly leftist, and they are good. I could go on and on.
So what's with the wussy, hyper-sensitive left? Apparently, they can dish it out but they can't take it.
The Camera has been great to me and given me more latitude than most papers would. They never censored my choice of subjects. I have been free to touch on all political topics and current affairs, as well as deeply personal topics such as the death of my daughter.
I can try to be persuasive, analytical, trivial, even intensely emotional. It's just the sticky subject of what is funny where we sometimes disagree.
It's not a big surprise: Humor is a tough subject. By its very nature what is funny to one person is offensive to another. What is clever to one is insipid to another. What seems pointless to one drives home a point to another.
Jokes are tricky and dangerous things. "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the theater?" is funny. "Other than that Mrs. Kennedy, how did you enjoy Dallas?" isn't funny, yet.
Lenny Bruce was arrested in New York for violating obscenity laws in the'60s. Comics in the future will be busted for violating some liberal town's hate crime laws.
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Golden. He lives in Boulder and can be reached at JonCaldara@yahoo.com.
I will be posting "The Column That Couldn't Be Printed" as a separate article. I'll post the link as soon as it's up.
BTTT
They are so full of it, that they must "act out" to relieve their system, or they will be forced to look in the mirror and reflect upon how full of their lies, they are.
So, they project these adjectives onto others, and that is why, when you examine what a liberal has to say, it is 95% deadly adjectives (some might describe them as "vile," or "vitriol," or "Hillary-esque") and 5%nouns, verbs, and punctuation, such as they are able to muster, given their public education at the hands of the liberal media from whom they learned everything, 'cepting Marx and Gramsci (AM "After Marx").
BTTT
Isn't Boulder the dumpster that finally got on the map for allowing feminazis to hang ceramic penises in the public library, though an American Flag wasn't allowed?
ping for later reading
Liberals suffer from NSH - No Sense of Humor!
The puny left-wing mediocrity cannot control us.
I try to offend them every chance I can...
Brochures detailing how the city quickly dispatches any signs of public acceptance of Christianity, like our fabled Christmas “angel tree,” from public display are being sent to the Middle East. It is part of the Chamber of Commerce’s “Boulder, it’s not just for ECO-terrorists” advertising campaign.
I've lived in ultra-liberal towns, and the writer must feel like a lone salmon swimming upstream -- however, GUARANTEED he is a joy and a treasure to like-minded citizens in the same town. I've been involved in writing and publishing enough to discern that quality of writing is NOT the editor's reason for not running it. It's plenty good enough. No, the editor didn't run it because it hit too painfully close to home. The editor is not big enough to run it, and a niche of readers have been selfishly deprived of something they would enjoy immensely.
Yes, now that you mention it. The library is located next to the city council building, which you can recognize by the UN flag waving proudly out front.
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