Humor cultures and another reason why Conservatives love Sarah Palin

June 27, 5:37 PMConservative Politics ExaminerAmos Wright

Earlier this week, after the news of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's (R) disappearance to Argentina and his adulterous relationship came out, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry (D), took a shot at Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (R):

Too bad," Kerry said, "if a governor had to go missing, it couldn't have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin."

Palin jabbed at Kerry in return, as you can see at this video over at Real Clear Politics. (It's cute, so go watch it.)

For the red meat crowd, you have in Sarah Palin something you see in Dick Cheney and John Bolton: conservatives who can and will hit back at the establishment Democrats who are constantly attacking them. That's always fun. But that's not what's interesting here.

COSBY VS. SEINFELD

What we see in this Palin/Kerry exchange is a difference between what we'll call Cosbian humor and Seinfeldian humor.

Cosbian humor was a celebration of humanity. Cosby was – and is, in a lot of ways – Conservative. (African-American culture tends to be conservative in a lot of ways neither right nor left realize. There is still a lot of Booker T. Washington in the dark, shallow sea of a culture somewhat polluted with too much W.E.B du Bois.)

The Cosby Show seems quaint by today's standards, but it almost single-handedly changed the way Americans viewed television. It created "must see TV." It's possible that The Cosby Show did more to improve race relations in America than all the lecturing by our universities' multicultural departments, and all the affirmative action laws on the books.

When The Cosby Show brought up Martin Luther King, for example, it was a reminder of our better virtues, not an indictment of humanity, though that could easily have been made. Cosby's show was a product of both the man, who himself was a great optimist, and the optimism brought about in part by a political era lead by another great optimist who - with others also roundly hated by the left - saw the Soviet Union for what it was, and called it that: the Evil Empire. (It just so happened to be a political system to which Progressives were sympathetic.)

(Cosbian humor isn't dead, by the way. You can still find it in The Simpsons.)

But Seinfeldian humor is a condemnation of humanity. It is Progressive. Nothing is sacred, and nothing is honored. It is a product of the Clinton era, where there is no right or wrong; there was only power and the will to use it. Seinfeldian humor is dipped in irony, it is focused on finding faults, no matter how trivial, and assaulting us with them. Smugness and incivility are its methods.

When the last show of its long and successful run came out, a friend of mine who had been a fan all throughout the series felt that it was an attack on its viewers. It told them they were nihilists.

Well, yes. That was the point of the show. It was a show about nothing, because nothing was worth anything. Did any of its fans think that the condemnation didn’t apply to them as well?

That "soup Nazi" is flung around in the common parlance tells us that even a Jewish comedian can drain the word "Nazi" of its horrible implications. We saw that take shape during the Bush years, when an administration that led the way to the freedom of about 5 million people was condemned as Hitlerian, by people - sadly too often liberal Jews - who would not muster such outrage for the oppositional ideology that had, as its goal, the annihilation of Israel.

BACK TO PALIN & KERRY

John Kerry’s quip is Seinfeldian. “Too bad Sarah Palin didn’t disappear.” The form is funny, but the intent isn't. It's just an attack. It's only context is opportunity. "Sanford's a Republican governor, so what other Republican governor can we attack?"

Palin’s joke – while a jab at John Kerry’s Lurch-like looks – is Cosbian. She’s not saying he should die or disappear. And in fact, the point of the joke isn’t that John Kerry has the face of his party's mascot. The point is that he’s yet another Progressive elitist who feels entitled to power in this world; a pessimist, whereas Palin remains an optimist despite being the victim of the harshest personal attacks in 20 years of American politics.

In Palin's joke (as well as her delivery) there’s a lesson to be learned that is very conservative, and alien to Progressivism: "cowboy up."

In Kerry’s there is also a lesson, more Seinfeldian than Cosbian: those who clothe themselves in the garments of love for fellow man – as nearly all Democrats do – do not necessarily wear such sentiments on the inside.