An American Lion

Hang in there, Andy Borowitz! Someday you'll have an original, funny idea

Bwah!

MINNEAPOLIS - (The Borowitz Report) - In a sign of his increasing prominence in the so-called Tea Party movement, a new poll shows Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul topping former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin among voters who describe themselves as morons.

In the poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota's Opinion Research Institute, 42% preferred Paul, 36% preferred Palin, and the remaining 22% were unsure what the word "prefer" meant.

According to Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll for the University of Minnesota, Paul's surging popularity among morons is bad news for Palin, who previously had a lock on that important constituency.

Someone pays money for this bullshit? Or is this charity? Is someone doing something for this guy so that he keeps some groceries in his rented icebox? Do they publish his pieces out of sheer pity? Does he have to pay someone fifty bucks a day to keep from having his mother's ventilator turned off? Jeebus.

Look, there are many successful people whose comedy I do not care for. The problem with this piece is, and this is going to shock you--ha! wait for it!--that we already know that people who think they're smart consider former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin an idiot. But, do you know what? That's stale. That's old. That's like a Rich Little impression of Ronald Reagan. Yeah, it meant something once, but let it go. Let it be said that you moved on from the easy jokes and went with something daring. The human experience is one of exploration and really, really busting your ass to do something excellent. Have you ever been unimpressed with a three bedroom rambler in the suburbs? Compare that to a Frank Lloyd Wright house that's built into the base of a waterfall surrounded by trees and limestone, done up entirely in stained glass and open space, my man. I'm not saying you have to be a genius--we all know half the stuff Wright came up with they couldn't build. But at least try to do something original and daring, right?

You're not breaking new ground trying to display your Northeastern sense of entitlement and superiority by trying to link someone who does something stupid to Palin and thereby turn it into a piece that gets run on the Huffington Post. This kind of thing is trite. It's pedestrian. It confirms a belief that we know is out there. It walks over old, tired ground. It's not August, 2008 anymore. It's not even worth a chuckle because no thought went into it. It's formulaic. It's what someone does when they're out of ideas--been there, done that!--and can't come up with anything worth doing. They don't even leave the comments on this kid's stuff open--at least, not when I looked at the post--because no one could even work up the indifference to give it a reaction of meh.

Where are the abandoned pieces this kid has tried to produce? Where's any evidence that he's taking this massive platform that he has to a new height of awareness in terms of satirical comedy? Reading Andy Borowitz on the Huffington Post is like finding an old copy of Reader's Digest and discovering that whoever put out that issue of Reader's Digest went with the leftovers and the remaindered scraps of bullshit that weren't up to par for the other issues they were putting out. His stuff doesn't even rise to the level of Life in These United States, and, brother, anyone can get an idea up to that level, no problem. There are insurance salesmen that have spent their entire lives reliving the thrill of getting a fifty dollar check in the mail because someone put their dowdy little blurb about Aunt Barb's trapezoidal technicolor mushroom freakout in Arizona in the September, 1983 issue.

Am I being unfair? Or am I just sick and tired of the fact that blogging ain't the meritocracy people pretend it to be? If you applied a reasonable level of criticism to what you see quoted above, there's no way you could justify posting it anywhere, other than in the pile of abandoned ideas and flat jokes.