From the WSJ "Best of the Web":
The White House Correspondents Dinner took place this weekend. As usual, the president was in attendance and a comedian provided the evening's entertainment. As Toby Harnden of London's Daily Telegraph reports, the comedian, Wanda Sykes, turned out to be a crass act:
The speech took a very ugly turn when she laid into [Rush] Limbaugh.
This is what she said: "Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails, so you're saying, 'I hope America fails,' you're, like, 'I dont [sic] care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq.' He just wants the country to fail. To me, that's treason.
"He's not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden is saying. You know, you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker. But he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight."
She then concluded: "Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that's what he needs." Obama seemed to think this bit was pretty hilarious, grinning and chuckling and turning to share the "joke" with the person sitting on his right.
Here's the video. In fairness to the president, we'd say "pretty hilarious" overstates the case. He does not appear to be laughing uncontrollably, although there is no doubt that he is amused. So are the folks at the left-wing Puffington Host, where the headline proclaims "Wanda Sykes Kills." (In comedy, kill means "to perform successfully"; the antonym is die or bomb.)
Our view is that Sykes's joke clearly crossed the line into poor taste, unredeemed by either humor or insight. The same is true for another joke that sparked a kerfuffle last week, described in an Associated Press report:
CBS Sports golf analyst David Feherty apologized Sunday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for a morbid joke that went bad in a Dallas magazine.
Feherty, one of the most popular golf analysts for his sharp wit and self-deprecating humor, was among five Dallas residents who wrote for "D Magazine" on former President George W. Bush moving to Dallas.
"From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though," Feherty wrote toward the end of his column.
"Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death."
The full column is here. In a statement, Fehrety described his botched joke as "a metaphor meant to describe how American troops felt about our 43rd president." (The next sentence of the column began: "I've never met a soldier who didn't love this president and this country.") In his apology, Fehrety added: "In retrospect, it was inappropriate and unacceptable, and has clearly insulted Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, and for that, I apologize."
Meanwhile, here is the full text of Sykes's apology: .
Our guess is that most normal apolitical people would view both Sykes's and Fehrety's jokes as unfunny and tasteless. Our sense, further, is that conservatives do not much care for Fehrety's joke either. The closest thing we could find to a defense was an item by blogger Jules Crittenden titled "Sounds Like His Heart Was in the Right Place." Yet Crittenden concedes Fehrety's "rhetorical excess" and devotes most of his post to arguing that many liberals have said things about U.S. soldiers that were worse and not in jest.
By contrast, lots of left-wing bloggers are cheering Sykes on, and the president of the United States was visibly amused by her joke. So the question is this: Why do liberals find this joke funny when they should find it embarrassing?
The answer, it seems clear, is that this is an example of shock humor: a genre that relies on the frisson of violating taboos. By our count, Sykes runs afoul of five taboos in her Limbaugh joke: She equates dissent with treason. She likens a domestic political opponent to a foreign enemy. She makes fun of the disabled (Limbaugh's past addiction to painkillers would entitle him to protection under the Americans With Disabilities Act). She makes light of a form of interrogation that some people consider torture. And she wishes somebody dead.
Except for the last one, these are all taboos that liberals promote and enforce with especial vigor. If a conservative violated any one of them, he would be on the inside track to be named "Worst Person in the World" by that NBC blowhard (as indeed Feherty was).
What makes Sykes's joke funny to a liberal, then, is the sense of danger that accompanies her risky themes, combined with the secure knowledge that since the joke is at the expense of a liberal hate figure, the usual rules do not apply. It's the same reason people on the left evince particular glee when they attack Clarence Thomas or Michael Steele in expressly racist terms, or when they use antigay innuendo against their political opponents (regardless of the latter's sexual orientation).
In Obama's wide grin as Sykes was telling her joke, we saw the smug look of a man who enjoys seeing his critics dehumanized. The president of the United States should be better than this.
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