We got a funky president, and people, it’s bad
(This is political. If you’re tired of politics, skip to something else.)
I didn’t watch Kaiser von Shitzenpants’ address to the Reichstag last night, but from everything I’ve read — someone called it “probably the most divisive State of the Union in history” — I think I’ve got the flavor of it.
None of what’s currently happening is going to end well for us in the United States. The pathways from here are pretty grim.
To be clear: I think the side of justice will ultimately win.
Jeff Bezos doesn’t understand why people liked The Washington Post. Therefore, he might as well wreck it.
When I was barely making enough money to pay my rent and was eating Ramen noodles and bagged salad for dinner every night, I still scraped up enough money to buy a Sunday copy of The Washington Post every week.
Later, I subscribed to the weekly edition of the newspaper, and then, when it went online, the digital version.
For most American journalists in the 1990s and early 2000s — especially those of us aspiring to break into the business — The Washington Post was very nearly the platonic ideal of what you wanted a big-city newspaper to be. It had everything: Serious news coverage, biting editorial columns and cartoons, and a very lively “Style” section and Sunday magazine.
Continue reading “Post-apocalypse”The curse of the social media age is that politeness and kindness don’t make you (in)famous — being nasty does
Some of you know I’m a big fan of Jack Benny, even though he died before I was born. (What difference should that make? I’ve been dying on the radio every weekend for 20 years.)
Benny was probably the greatest American comedian of the 1940s and 1950s, so it’s a shame he’s not better remembered today. He centered Black and female talent — Benny was never shy about giving Eddie Anderson (Rochester) or Mary Livingston punchlines that scored off of him — and he did a lot to mainstream Jewish humor for gentile audiences.
Anyway, I love Jack Benny. Not for nothing does our Internet radio station, Tube City Online Radio, run Jack Benny every Sunday night at 7 p.m., just as it aired on network radio “back in the day.” (We’re currently running shows from 1945 in order. Check it out some Sunday night.)
Though he never completed high school, Benny was well-read. He loved language and he appreciated writers. While other comedians tried to pretend they didn’t use writers, Benny wasn’t above bringing them on stage and mentioning their names. When you see Seth Meyers or Conan O’Brien or David Letterman feature their writers in sketches — that’s a technique more or less invented by Jack Benny.
Benny also was a master of timing and misdirection. He famously got laughs just out of a well-timed stare or an uncomfortable silence. He knew that if he suggested the punchline but stopped short of saying it out loud, the audience would complete the joke in their minds and their laughter would be even louder and longer and more appreciative.
In more recent times, Tina Fey and Seth Meyers have talked about how they hate “clapter.” “Clapter” is when the audience claps instead of laughing because you’ve told a joke that has an obvious punchline and the audience applauds to show they agree with your opinion. It’s the hack who comes out on stage and says, “Hey, how about that Donald Trump? Is that guy a clown or what?” And his audience claps, they don’t laugh.
I like Stephen Colbert, but I find a lot of his punchlines generate “clapter.” To be honest, a lot of Jimmy Kimmel’s political jokes also are designed for “clapter.” Seth Meyers is equally hard on Trump, but his jokes are more circuitous and absurdist; he’s also not shy about making himself the butt of the joke, and that makes me laugh.
Benny used to tell his writers not to make the punchlines “too lappy.” That “You’re throwing it into their laps. Too lappy.”
Since I don’t have a daily radio show, I use social media as my radio show. I try to write a least a couple of jokes every day. Most of them are pretty bad, but some of them make me laugh.
On Sunday night, as the Steelers were falling apart against the Los Angeles Chargers, the Democrats in the U.S. Senate were caving into Republican demands to reopen in government but getting very little in return, other than an empty promise to vote on health insurance subsidies in a few months. So I wrote, “The Steelers defense tonight must be getting coached by Chuck Schumer. But I hear the Chargers have promised to give them a chance to score some points in the fourth quarter.”
I got a fair amount of clapter, but one follower — Dana Simpson, who writes “Phoebe & Her Unicorn” — took me task for a gratuitous smack at Chuck Schumer, and you know what? She was right. It also was a lazy whack at Steelers coaching, which has become a reliable, hacky punchline in Pittsburgh over the last few years, like making fun of the Pirates (which I’ve also done). Like I said, I try to write some jokes every day, but they’re not all gems.
I was thinking about all of this after social media platform Bluesky suspended two people for making what the company called threats of violence. Sarah Kendzior, a best-selling author and former writer for the New York Daily News, Toronto Globe & Mail, and other prominent publication, was suspended after she made fun of an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jon Fasman. Fasman wrote that he had recently “discovered” a “deeply uncool” country music singer who he felt was more or less forgotten. The country music singer was Johnny Cash.
Lots of people dunked on the article — how does anyone grow up in America without knowing who Johnny Cash is? — and Kendzior quipped she wanted to shoot Fasman “just to watch him die,” quoting a line from Cash’s most famous song, “Folsom Prison Blues.” Bluesky called it a “credible threat of violence.”
And then, comedian Patton Oswalt, whose grouchy exterior and profane jokes mask a really sensitive soul, was suspended by Bluesky for making an off-color remark about podcaster Megyn Kelly. In the wake of the release of thousands of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, Kelly has been defending President Trump, who has a well-known interest in the sexual attractiveness of teen-age girls.
Kelly’s remarks have been cringeworthy, even by her (low) standards. Being sexually attracted to 15-year-old girls is no big deal, she suggested this week: “He wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
Oswalt — who has a 16-year-old daughter — posted some of Kelly’s remarks and then said, “Wood chipper. Feet first.”
Bluesky regarded that as a threat; as if Oswalt was going to kidnap Megyn Kelly and give her the “Fargo” treatment.
The curse of our social media age is that no one gets rewarded for being nice and calm and polite. Calm and sensible doesn’t go viral on TikTok or Twitter; huffing aerosol cans until you pass out or taking massive doses of Benadryl does. What else goes viral? Writing horrible things about other people.
I’ve been on the radio for 20 years and writing professionally since I was 18 years old, and I’ve mostly stayed out of trouble. (Not always, but that’s a story for another time.)
And by staying mostly out of trouble, I also haven’t become rich and famous. That’s the trade-off. As a former boss used to say, “If you want to run with the big dogs, you got to learn to pee in the tall grass.” If you want to get rich and (in)famous from your writing or broadcasting, you have to push the envelope, and sometimes that means going too far and being offensive — and getting fired from your job or kicked off of a platform. Just ask Howard Stern.
I don’t know if either Kendzior or Oswalt should have been suspended from Bluesky. Kendzior’s joke was a bit more open to misinterpretation; if someone didn’t know who Johnny Cash was, and had never heard the song “Folsom Prison Blues,” I guess they could have assumed she really was angry enough to shoot the Wall Street Journal writer. It’s a stretch, but I could see it happening. Oswalt’s suspension is stupid; he’s a world-famous comedian best known for telling raw and sometimes raunchy stories. No one seriously thinks he was going to put Megyn Kelly into a wood chipper.
I suppose the moral of the story, if there is one, is that if you want to avoid getting kicked off of any platform — whether it’s social media, your company’s Slack channel or a radio station — you’d best not be too “lappy.” Make the audience work for the joke, just like Jack Benny did. Don’t go for clapter and don’t make it too obvious. Your fans will appreciate being in on the joke but it will go over the heads of the humorless idiots who control much of the Internet.
Elon Musk, like Daffy Duck, finally came up against his own limitations — including a possibly vestigial sense of shame
Over the weekend, my best friend was playing “Looney Tunes” clips for the amusement of his kids, and we started talking about the cartoon where Daffy Duck — frustrated by Bugs Bunny’s popularity — keeps trying to one-up him, until finally, Daffy swallows explosives and blows himself up.
The audience goes wild and even Bugs Bunny is impressed: “That’s terrific, Daffy! They want more!”
Daffy, who is now a ghost floating up to heaven, laments, “I know, but I can only do it once.”
(The cartoon, from 1957, is called “Show Biz Bugs.”)
I’ve been thinking about the cartoon in relation to you-know-who. I’ve developed a theory about you-know-who and the people around him.
Continue reading “Look who blinked”On Election Day, a middle-aged disc jockey’s mind sometimes wanders. But will it ever come back?
Today, Pennsylvania voters emerge from their boroughs to decide if the U.S. will have early fascism or four more years of democracy.
I sure am tired of every election being “the most important election of our lifetimes.” I want some boring elections. I want a couple of nerds up there, Republican and Democratic, arguing over whether the capital gains tax rate should be 30 percent or 30.5 percent.
Bring back the halcyon days when the vice president couldn’t spell “potatoe” and when people voted against Jimmy Carter because he wore a sweater, not because they thought he literally was a demon.
Bring back the days when a literal joke candidate, such as Pogo Possum or Snoopy or Gracie Allen or Pat Paulsen could run for office, and we knew it was meant to be a joke; as opposed to having a real candidate who pretends to perform oral sex on a microphone and talks about Arnold Palmer’s genitals, and we all have to ask, “is this a joke?”
No matter what happens with this election, I think we’re still a long, long way from getting back to those days.
Robbie Fulks had a song called “America is a Hard Religion.” He was damned right.
Eight years later, a lot of Republicans are still pissed off that Hillary Clinton referred to some of Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables.”
It was a ham-handed remark that reinforced the idea that Clinton was condescending and out of touch, but to bend over backwards to be fair (and I usually don’t), she did specify that she was referring to people who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
That part of what she said was rarely if ever quoted in the media.
The “deplorables” comment haunted her campaign and continues to haunt Democrats. Not a week goes by that I don’t hear or read some Trump supporter bringing up that comment.
Which begs the question: If you think Hillary Clinton was referring to you, does that mean you think you’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or Islamophobic? Because that’s something you have the power to fix.
I guess if I did deplorable things to other people, I would be offended if someone called me “deplorable,” but I try not to do deplorable things to other people.
Which, to be honest, is actually a lot easier than some people make it out to be.
Earlier this week, I re-posted a message from the Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh, the Right Rev. Ketlen Solak, on my LinkedIn feed. Bishop Solak wrote:
“At a time when the constant use of smoke and mirrors is wielded in an effort to confound many, the boundary between truth and untruth looks quite blurry on the surface. The denigration of immigrants serves as a prime example. When the boundary between truth and untruth becomes blurred, the principles of Scripture, particularly the eternal principles of love and justice, which call people of faith to act with love and fairness, recalibrate our vision and understanding.”
Someone responded: “Tell me you’ve endorsed Kamala without telling me you’ve endorsed Kamala.”
Well, the Lutheran Conference of Bishops issued a similar statement, which says, in part: “We, the members of the Conference of Bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, speak with one voice to condemn the hateful, deceptive, violent speech that has too readily found a place in our national discourse. We lament the ways this language has led to hate-fueled action. We refuse to accept the ongoing normalization of lies and deceit.”
To be fair, the Bible is pretty clear in stating Jesus’ positions on lying (He’s against it) and welcoming strangers and foreigners (He’s for it).
Again, if you dislike being called “deplorable,” then don’t do deplorable things, like lying and demonizing people who look different from you, or who were born in a different country. Again: It’s much simpler than it’s made out to be.
While we’re on the subject, out in my corner of Pennsyltucky, a bunch of new Trump signs and flags went up over the weekend, after the Madison Square Garden rally. Which suggests that a lot of people saw the rally and really liked what they saw; if only we had a word to describe that behavior.
On the other hand, I read somewhere that Leon Mush was spending part of his fortune to provide supporters with free Trump signs. So who knows? If you’re going to get a sign for free, why not?
Which begs another question, why was Trump giving away free signs while the Dems were charging for them? A Kamala Harris sign, from the official Kamala Harris campaign website, was $20, plus $17.06 shipping.
This fits a pattern. Republicans and conservatives give away stuff — including access to their websites. Fox News’ website is free; CNN now has a paywall. The Washington Times (owned by the Rev. Moon’s Unification Church) is free; the Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos) has a paywall.
Is it any wonder that right-wing propaganda spreads so quickly?
To paraphrase Mark Twain, a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still figuring out the shipping and handling costs.
Finally, I rarely if ever watch “Saturday Night Live” these days, and this season has been no exception.
However, if this Saturday, we have to see Maya Rudolph sing “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen on an empty stage, I’m going to go all Elvis on my TV.
Sears, Roebuck & Co. is dead, but their credit card department doesn’t seem to know it yet
Every month I get a plaintive email from Sears reminding me that I have a zero balance on my Sears card, and wouldn’t I like to buy something?
Sure. As far as I can tell, the closest Sears store to me is Orlando, Fla. Give me a time machine and I’ll go back 10 years to when they still had a store where I could shop. The one at Penn Center in Wilkins Twp. is now a self-storage place; the one at Century III Mall is slowly being demolished; the stores in East Liberty and Allegheny Center Mall are fading memories.
Speaking of Sears, David Iskra on Threads commented that J.D. Vance sounds like a made-up Sears store brand:
JD Vance sounds like a clothing line from Sears that my mom would try to convince me to wear in 4th grade when everyone else had designer jeans. “How about this sweater for $9.99? It’s JD Vance. That sounds fancy.” (Cut to me getting beat up because of my JD Vance sweater.)
“Sure, we have the J.D. Vance sweaters, they’re between the Toughskins jeans and the Arnie Palmer ties. Thank you for shopping at Sears. Did you know we have a sale today on Diehard batteries and Sears Best paint?”
Some day I should write about my affection for Sears. When I was working as a mechanic for Kennywood as an 18-year-old, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was the only place that would give me a credit card to buy tools. When I needed to rent a car two years later, I wasn’t able to get one from Avis or Hertz because I was too young … but Sears Rent-a-Car was happy to rent me a new Dodge Intrepid on my same Sears card.
That engendered real loyalty from me. When I needed some good shirts for job interviews, I returned to Sears. When I bought a house and needed a new fridge, I went to Sears. When a storm brought down a tree in my back yard, I went to Sears and bought a chainsaw. When I ran out of space and needed a tool shed, I bought it from Sears.
Three years ago, I had to paint a couple of doors on our house. Digging around in the garage, I found a gallon of Sears Weatherbeater paint that we’d bought for another project and never used. It went on fine and looked great. We’ve since moved, but I’m sure the paint still looks good.
The wrecking of Sears by hedge-fund billionaire Eddie Lampert was positively criminal. The narrative that Amazon killed Sears isn’t accurate; Sears was murdered by its own CEO, who stripped it for parts and left the mess in a ditch for the bankruptcy courts to clean up … and then purchased back the carcass for pennies on the dollar!
Anyway, Sears, thanks for the reminder that you’re still alive … barely. It’s like getting an email from an old girlfriend and opening it to find out she’s a meth head.
Yes, there are still a few Sears stores; the aforementioned one in Orlando, and fewer than a dozen others around the United States. There is also a Sears website, but almost nothing on it is sold by Zombie Sears; instead, there are a bunch of no-name products sold by bottom-feeding third-party vendors, much like those that infest Amazon.
I recently needed a battery for a Sears Craftsman leaf-blower. I couldn’t get it from the Sears website. I had to buy it from Lowe’s.
Ah well. How about memories from a happier time in Sears’ history? When my dad passed away, I inherited his Sears Craftsman table saw, which was almost as old as he was.
I stripped it down, cleaned it, greased it, put a new belt on it, rewired the motor, added a splitter and guard, and connected it to a safety cut-off switch. I also had to replace the miter gauge; luckily, Sears sold about 15 billion of these saws, and the gauge was readily available on eBay.
Here it is, running, to see if the vibrations of the belt or motor will knock over a nickel standing on its edge:
Truthfully, I need a table saw maybe twice a year. But having this in the garage almost makes me want to saw more lumber.
Yes, you could buy almost anything from Sears, Roebuck & Co., from infant underpants to a table saw that’s still running after 75 years.
As it turns out, there was only one thing they didn’t sell, as Dorothy Shay lamented in 1949:
Dear Mister Sears and Mister Roebuck:
I been checkin’ your supplies for tennis courts.
There is somethin’ I should get—
Not a racket or a net—
But I sure could use that rascal in the shorts.
Dear Mister Sears and Mister Roebuck:
Your canoe on page one-hundred forty-three—
Now that’s the type that I would pick,
But I’m up a diff’rent crick.
Can’t you send a feller here to paddle me?
I don’t want a bath
Soapy water makes me howl
Don’t the folks in your ads ever mind it?
I can’t use a bath. You can keep your Turkish towel;
Only ship me the sheikh from behind it.
Don’t mean to fuss, poor Mister Roebuck,
But you’ll never fill my order, it appears.
If the shortage is acute,
I’m an easy girl to suit.
I’ll shut up if you will send me Mister Sears (if he ain’t taken!)
I’ll shut up if you will send me Mister Sears.
I hope Joe Biden spends the rest of the year driving his Corvette across the lawn at Trump Bedminster National Golf Club, doing donuts on the greens, spraying turf everywhere, and saying, “The Supreme Court says I have immunity, motherf-cker!”
If Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee — and I think it would be suicidal for the Democrats to turn this into an intra-party squabble, but I never doubt their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — then I sure hope that Maya Rudolph has Saturday nights free on his schedule this fall. She’s going to be busy.
Lots of people are messaging me privately saying they don’t think Harris could win because of racism and misogyny. They said, “The Democrats should play it safe and pick a white, middle-aged guy, like Gavin Newsom.”
I have three deep thoughts on that subject.
The first deep thought is that bypassing the vice president is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons. It would alienate core Democratic voters — women and people of color — and also would allow the news media to focus on chaos and infighting. The Dems have already lost a month since Biden’s disastrous debate; instead of talking about Biden’s success stories (and he has been successful, despite what your elderly uncle posts on Facebook) the entire media narrative has been “Biden is frail.”
My second deep thought is that people who wouldn’t vote for a Black woman weren’t going to vote for Joe Biden anyway, simply because he’s a Democrat. There is no mythical bland Midwestern white guy who is going to be acceptable to Trump’s base. That well of potential voters is completely poisoned; they are utterly captured by Christian talk-radio, cable TV news and the vast right-wing bullshit machine, which is being ably assisted by billionaire technology companies funded by people such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.
(If Biden’s administration is doing such a bad job, ask yourself this: Why are people such as Thiel, Musk and Andreessen spending billions of dollars to try to defeat him? Because the Biden Administration is finally enforcing anti-trust laws that have been on the books for decades, and they’re gearing up to come after the Internet monopolies.)
Deep thought 3: Democrats need to stop pandering to mythical white male Republicans who they think can be persuaded to vote for conservative Democrats, and start pandering to their own voters for a change.
The solid base of Trump dead-enders are not persuadable by any Democratic candidate. I talk to them; I listen to right-wing talk radio. Trump’s core supporters are firmly convinced that Democrats are pedophiles who drink the blood of infants and want to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship with open borders and perform forced sex changes on kindergarten kids. The propaganda has worked on them.
On the other side, people who were going to vote for Joe Biden no matter what — even if the Democratic Party had to do a “Weekend at Bernie’s” on him — are not suddenly going to refuse to vote because Biden’s vice president is the nominee.
I suspect, however, that there is a vast middle ground of voters who were unenthusiastic about Joe Biden, or who weren’t closely paying attention because they figured 2024 was just going to be a rerun of 2020. Maybe that’s not a very large group of people. Maybe it’s only a few percentage points. But in an election that was going to be close, no matter what, a few percentage points could make the difference. I suspect they are much more “gettable” for the Democrats with a new, energetic candidate. If those votes are now in play, it’s hard to see that as bad news for the Dems.
But hey, what do I know? I thought the Edsel was a good idea.
Anyway, today is National Ice Cream Day. Joe Biden has had a crappy couple of weeks. I hope he’s enjoying some really good ice cream today.
And if Kamala Harris is looking for a bland middle-aged white male from Pennsylvania who will bring balance to the ticket, I’m tanned, rested and ready to serve as her vice president:
Radical thought: Maybe each of us should try to live our lives so that if someone tries to hurt us people don’t laugh and say things like “too bad they missed”
What are some things you wish you had taken photos of? Or some things you wish you had a recording of?
A friend shared this photo on Facebook today. It was taken in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood and appears to date from the early 1930s, based on the cars and the clothing.
I know it sounds like I’m 90 years old, but into my young adulthood — at least the late 1990s, maybe as late as the early 2000s — there used to be a newspaper vendor at the corner of Fifth and Walnut street in McKeesport, and another at Fifth and Sinclair street, selling the McKeesport Daily News.
You’d pull up in a car, hand them 50 cents, and they’d hand you back a newspaper. Or, you could buy a paper before catching a bus. They had wooden newsstands just like this one, painted Kelly green.
I assume that in generations gone back, you might have caught a streetcar instead, or a train to Pittsburgh; I’ve seen photos of Downtown McKeesport from the 1940s, showing stands just like this one: “Read The Pittsburgh Newspapers.”
Beginning in the 1980s, as soon as I got my first camera, I took photos of a lot of things, but I never snapped any photos of the vendors or their stands. They were just one of those things that I thought would be around forever — and now they’re gone, along with the McKeesport Daily News.
Back in the day, I also recorded tapes of radio stations and hosts that I liked — Doug Hoerth, O’Brien and Garry, a few others, but now I wish I’d recorded more, and that I could have afforded a better tape recorder and better tapes.
Who would have thought that WTAE 1250 would someday be gone, and with it, local talk radio that wasn’t political?
Or that KQV 1410 would no longer be “all-news, all-the-time,” with the clickety-clackety teletype noises in the background (hilariously, and anachronistically, long after teletypes had been removed from newsrooms).
What are some things you wish you had taken photos of? Or some things you wish you had a recording of? Bleep-bloop it down in the comments or email me at jaythurbershow@gmail.com.
Just don’t get scared, ’cause you’re gonna be spared
Alert Listener Jim writes: “If Saturday night you were downtown, working for the FBI, your case would be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, not the DA man.”
Dear Jim: Thank you for writing. The narrator, who is working for the FBI, is in a bootlegging boozer, so it’s possible that he’s investigating illegal liquor trafficking, which is a federal crime — though, admittedly, one that normally would be the jurisdiction of the U.S. Treasury Department, not the Justice Department.
On the other hand, it’s a nest of bad men, so theoretically multiple offenses are occurring on the premises. For instance, somebody shooting a gun is usually a state crime — and thus the purview of the district attorney — unless it’s happening in conjunction with the federal crime that the FBI (and presumably the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives) is investigating.
Obviously, the FBI agent’s expert testimony is going to help the DA close the nest of bad men, possibly with the involvement of the state liquor control authorities, which is why the DA is so grateful for the FBI’s involvement that by the end of the night, he’s pumping the agent’s hand. (Why is the DA shaking his left hand, though, instead of his right hand, which the long, cool woman is holding? Is this, perhaps, some sort of secret Masonic ritual? The question is left as an exercise for the reader. Please show your work.)
To me, the biggest question is about the long, cool woman’s pair of 45s. This is clearly a double entendre. In fact, it’s blatant enough to be a single entendre. And yet even a small child knows that with bra measurements, numbers are used for band sizes, not cup sizes; cup sizes are letters.
(Pursuing this line further, have some sympathy for the long, cool woman. If she’s 5’9″ and skinny but has a 45-inch bust, she’s going to have back problems. Maybe she’s in the bootlegging boozer to get some alcohol to ease her pain.)
Anyway, I hope that clears up any confusion. None of this should be construed as legal advice. If you find yourself in a bootlegging boozer with a nest of bad men this Saturday night, please consult an attorney, not a 52-year-old rock song or a weekend disc jockey who isn’t much younger.
Join us next week, when we discuss the fact that a small-town girl “born and raised in South Detroit” would actually be from Windsor, Ont., and how if Daddy was a cop “on the east side of Chicago” the night Chicago died, he was patrolling Lake Michigan.
P.S. Here’s the real story behind the song. It’s about the Prohibition era and was deliberately written as a pastiche of Jerry Reed, Creedence Clearwater Revival and other swamp-rock acts.
