Now, Donna Edwards is to be mocked — on Politico! — because the nitwits in the audience couldn't get jokes like: "Come on, help me y’all: I want to give a really special shout out to Nancy Pelosi and all my sisters in the libido caucus — holla'!"
Politico makes Edwards seem bad because the crowd — made up of "wonky... journalists, lawmakers, and all variety of political insiders" — didn't understand the "libido" reference:
The next day, some attendees figured out she was mocking a recent speech by Mike Huckabee, who accused Democrats of telling women they’re helpless without "Uncle Sugar" and the government to control their libido with birth control.The next day! How can anyone pull off any humor if the most current and most bandied about news stories cannot be referenced? I mean, I know Jay Leno does political humor by prefacing jokes with an explanation of the news story that he's about to deliver a punchline, but he's talking to everybody, and not everybody follows the news. He's not speaking to a wonky crowd of journalists, lawmakers, and all variety of political insiders. You can't count on them to know the background? These people are stupider than I'd thought. Political insiders. Wonky journalists. Pathetic!
Donna Edwards should not be the target here. So her delivery wasn't at the professional-comic-actor level. The problem is with the audience, these supposedly with-it insiders. They didn't laugh. They didn't get it. Their cluelessness was palpable. And when they figure out the jokes the next day they get Politico to throw crap at Edwards.
Were you distracted? Did you take Politico's misdirection?
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75 comments:
Sorta like the in-room response to Colbert's White House Press dinner a few years ago. DC press hate when they miss the joke, or might be the butt of it.
Everything is supposed to be easy to understand to the great minds of beltway media.
Since when did American citizens hire elected officials to be stand-up comedians?
Amusing ourselves to the poor house.
I'm guessing that Ms. Edwards didn't understand the jokes either. She was told that the speech was written by a very clever writer.
Oh, yeah.....Has she ever before used libido in a sentence?....and was there a teleprompter involved?
I've been assuming our elected officials are stand-up comedians for some time now....Another palpable truth!
Al Franken is a senator. Doesn't that just say absolutely everything you could possibly every need to know about the state of our legislators?
I'm glad the libido joke bombed, because if it was written by a Daily Show operative, it was meant to further the slanderous and dastardly meme that it was Huckabee and the Republicans that believed women had uncontrollable libidos.
So if the audience 'got' the joke, it would had been that false reference that they 'got', and so they would not have 'gotten' it at all.
I got the joke as soon as I read it, and it still isn't funny.
I read the article earlier. The major complaint as I read it was that Edwards, who by the way is a PC hack, was focused on telling painful jokes at the expense of others, rather than using self-deprecating humor...
It didn't bomb because it wasn't funny.
The nitwits in the audience didn't understand the reference.
If they did and didn't laugh it would mean something else.
The evidence we have is probative not of the unfunniness of the joke but of the cluelessness of the supposedly sophisticated insiders.
That's what's interesting here.
But if being up to date on current events means we have to know what Huckabee's up to, I don't want it (though sadly I knew about it and the [willful?] misinterpretation of the bien pensant).
I'm sure some of the people in the audience got the reference but had a normal reaction to an unfunny joke. Perhaps it's a sign that the War On Women You Guys can go to far.
On what planet is asking the "libido caucus" to "holla," funny?
Politico claims that the attendees didn't get until the next day, but that's highly unlikely. It wasn't just political-types there, it was a CORRESPONDENT foundation dinner. That means reporters. They "got" the reference since they were the ones who wrote the stories about it in the first place. They just didn't think it was funny.
I read those jokes. They weren't funny. They were mean-spirited.
The reason that the annual White House dinner jokes "work," is because they are supposed to poke equal fun at themselves and at their political opponents. Edwards didn't do that. She wasn't poking fun. She was being abrasive and nasty.
It didn't bomb because it wasn't funny.
I'd disagree. An audience can not "get" a joke and the joke still be not very funny.
According to reports (as a rule, I avoid listening to Congresscritters for any appreciable length of time), it was a speech slamming Republicans constantly.
So, it was mean-spirited. And the joke cited here, sorry, wasn't close to being funny.
As a waiter, I was always solid with not encouraging terrible jokes during a meal.
Also, to bring up Seinfeld again, years ago he said, basically, if a joke bombs, it is never the audience's fault.
It is, 100% of the time, the person telling the joke's fault. The person supplying the humor didn't do so terribly well.
"Know your audience" is an old adage, but always true for anyone doing a comedy routine. Edwards lives and works with the 'wonky' crowd she was speaking to, but seemed pretty clueless herself (unlike, say, Leno, who understands his audience very well).
Clueless may be the right description, but it applies to all the participants here, especially the would-be comic who had no idea where she was or who she was trying to entertain.
At one point she seemed to compare Republicans to monkeys with typewriters who keep typing “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” over and over again.
Yes, those bloody handprints, hilarious. Where someone was obviously being dragged to their death, and their final sign of life was their bloodied hands clutching at a wall.
I can think of no funnier joke.
But Huckabee is the perfect foil for modern progressive humor. He is an old, Christian, white, male from the rural (is there any other) gun loving south.
The press audience was not able to get her using the W word. They have a professional blind spot to slandering a large part of their audience. But I bet the MSNBC folks were rolling on the floor laughing.
Ms. Edwards was like watching Robespierre doing stand up about guillotined heads opening their dumb eyes and looking around for a second after the blade falls. It's witty triumphant, but deep down not funny at all.
The comedienne committed "culpable botchery," but go ahead and blame the audience.
In former Soviet times we are forever laughing at leaders' jokes.
There, I got in my dig at Russia, too.
These people are stupider than I'd thought. Political insiders. Wonky journalists. Pathetic!
Damn it! They are supposed to know all the newest secret handshakes.
It was damn funny, I got it right away when I read the "libido" reference. We were just discussing women's libido, "sport fuckng" birth control, Uncle Sugar and women running away from a statue of a sleepwalking man because of fear of sex, yesterday on another thread. It all makes sense to those who are aware and funny to those with a sense of humor.
But I bet the MSNBC folks were rolling on the floor laughing.
ROFL'ing is rolfing for the dyslexic.
LOL!
Inga, if you found her joke funny, then the person with a humor problem seems to be you.
Just because you agree with her doesn't mean everything she says is gold.
Just sayin'
I agree that a comedian needs to know what the audience is capable of understanding and finding funny and that Winstead and Edwards failed in that way.
But I'm more interested in finding out what we've found out about the capacity of this particular audience.
The topic of whether the jokes were funny isn't important to me here. Funniness is subjective, and the point of doing a comedy routine is to amuse (or otherwise stimulate) the audience, and there was a big misconception here, which was that the audience was crowded with people who were up on the latest news and were hip to the current memes (like "libido").
No Damiksec,
It shows that people who don't find Huckabee's statement about women not controlling their libido, thusly needing Uncle Sugar to provide their birth control, absurd and laughable, are conservatives with a problem.
The evidence suggests, Counselor, that someone had to explain the joke to Rachael Bade the next day!
Rachel, in fact, told the funniest joke in her story. "It’s a reminder how hard it is to entertain a tough crowd, like one filled with cynical journalists."
Now that's a good one. I don't care who you are, dat dere is funny!
I seem to remember women who could control my libido. So their own should be a piece of cake.
Inga,
That's not Huckabee's argument. That's Huckabee looking at the implicit argument of Sandra Fluke, et.al.
I think it's legitimate to willfully misunderstand something to make it funny, when it's a "good faith" proposition that's done for humor's sake. But that's not what's going on with the Huckabee thing.
It's just like the binders full of women thing. It's hard to know if they understand or just hope we won't.
Donna Edwards is ALWAYS painful to listen to. If I see her on a news talk-fest it's a race to change the channel.
Unfortunatly MattL, that was not the implicit argument of Sndra Fluke, it was the argument of Rush Limbaugh, the leader of the GOP. This is where you folks go wrong.
Ann,
You're making the mistake of assuming that the article's author was accurate in stating that the audience didn't "get it."
As I pointed out previously, the audience was at least half full of the very people who wrote the news articles she was riffing on.
There is literally NO WAY they "didn't get" the supposed humor.
They just didn't like it. Look at the comments: literally one out of more than two dozen people thought it was funny - and only because she agreed with the sentiment.
Now multiply that times a roomful of people - most of whom are sitting at a table where the object of her scorn and derision are sitting. How impolite would it be to laugh literally in their face? THAT is what palpable bitchery would look like up close and personal.
Get the picture now?
Now Inga is trying to be funny! Limbaugh leads the GOP?
Yeah, right!
Limbaugh chose Bob Dole, W, John McCain and Mittens?
Sorry, Inga, I must have my history wrong. I didn't recall Rush calling for birth control benefits.
The more you know...
Rush Limbaugh framed Sandra Fluke and her argument that way, no use in denying it now, nor that he doesn't lead the GOP. Those like Huckabee who referenced Limbaugh's flawed logic are laughable and joke worthy. The audience may have heard that joke one too many times and it's a few weeks old now, which can make it less laughable, but still worthy of a head shake.
I repeat, women are sperm Recepticles , cash donors and voters for democrats.
And they're kinda fun to slap around right Alex? Ask Kim. You know damned well Jackson knows. Right Daryl?
He framed her as a whore. Because she is a whore. A self professed whore.
And that's ok, just don't demand I pay for your whoredom.
I'll pay for my own whores thank you.
Violating Politically Correct women's self image requirements is a moving target that requires keeping up with the latest words and phrases.
For example, a new phrase "weaponizing the government" was used about the IRS Scandal.
That could also be said as weaponizing slander. That thought goes with seeing public life as a continuous political struggle.
Others that bragged on their skill at continuous political struggle were Adolph Schicklgruber and Mohammed of Mecca.
Jesus says peace be with you.
Like most Limbaugh "critics", Inga obviously doesn't listen to Limbaugh!
Winstead left the show in 1998, and it didn't become the huge hit it is until after she left, yet she has been riding on that "Daily Show" connection ever since.
She is not funny. I am not sure if she ever has been. Even when she is on non-political comedy panels, she is a scold to others, particularly male comedians.
I think you are misdirected Ann. Making fun of someone's spelling of shenanigans and then spelling it for them over and over is funny?
Catherine, I agree with you on Liz Winstead, I don't find her particularly funny.
But that's not saying that Huckabee's statement wasn't funny.
Until I got gerrymandered out of her district (Yay!) Edwards was my representative. She is a desperately earnest environmental & social justice liberal.
Edwards:stand up comedy :: Dukkakis:tank
Who in their right mind would picture Nancy Pelosi & libido together? She's what one might use to control one's libido.
Palin & libido, however.....
The truth can be quite amusing, Mabel.
Ann --
Timing is everything. Edwards had already lost the audience with her unfunny lines (or Winstead's unfunny lines) before she made the libido reference. For a comedy audience anywhere, you better have a great track record going into a bad stand-up set on the level of a Jerry Seinfeld or a Jay Leno, or people will simply tune you out and never return.
(I think the biggest problem here -- pre-Huckabee libido reference -- was that because she was appearing in front of a group of journalists, Edwards and Winstead assumed that would be the same as doing a routine in front of MSNBC's prime-time show hosts. Jokes that might work there due to a shared world view don't fare as well when the target audience is broadened, especially since this is 2014, not 2009 and the Hope and Change solidarity between the press and those in charge in Washington has in large part withered away.)
The Althouse commentariat is a tough crowd.
I'd like to see video of the whole speech.
I googled for it and found something else and I thought her self-presentation was fine. I don't believe she was that horrible.
But I don't know why she was doing comedy that required more than straightforward reading.
And I'd just really like to know how that story ended up in that form in Politico.
Who's out to mess up her upward path in the political world?
If a crowd of political insiders don't get your reference, it's probably not as current and bandied-about as you think it is.
Sisterhood of the Impoverished Condoms
Anyway, it's not their libido that's a concern. It's their belief in spontaneous conception which enables them to rationalize elective abortion for money, ego, convenience, and, yes, sex. An unprecedented violation of human rights is not funny.
Here's the WaPo article, which has some video (including the "libido" joke). Really, it was not that bad. And Donna Edwards looks great.
The War On Women is not something to joke about!!!
Did u comment on Huckabee's looks? If you didn't, what u just did was sexist.
Looking at the WaPo story, it's less snarky than the Politico one, but no less critical in the end of the material:
Missing was the self-deprecation that makes that kind of barb-throwing funny. The consensus of the unamused crowd seemed to be that she should have ended where she began, with a brief video spoofing the hit ABC show “Scandal,” involving a plot line of her — playing the show’s lead character, Olivia Pope — caught in a steamy smooch with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). (In real life, there’s a sweet picture of Boehner and Edwards sharing a friendly kiss at a breast-cancer benefit.)
Hard to believe the gags were the work of professionals.
I think along with the choice of overly-partisan material that misread the audience, Heil's observation that people want their politicians to be at least a little self-deprecating when they attempt to do jokes is true. A routine that targets a pol's ideological foes and leaves him or herself unscathed comes across as someone who only has a sense of humor when other people are the butt of their jokes.
Oh, our Congress is filled with jokers, alright. And as Mark Twain noted so long, it's our only "distinctly native American criminal class."
Also, how long ago was that Huckabee bon mot, anyway? Months? People aren't going recognize the joke if the punch line is months old. Jokes age in dog years anyway, so the sistah needs to get some new material that's fresh enough not to put off a dead mackerel stench. Dig it?
Arssanguinus said...
Al Franken is a senator. Doesn't that just say absolutely everything you could possibly every need to know about the state of our legislators?
It says that he was good enough, or he was smart enough, or doggone it, a plurality of people liked him. Well, at least during some point of the six-year Senatorial election cycle. God knows why.
Absent a video of the speech, all of these comments are pointless.
From the two jokes actually cited in the Politico piece, there's no way to tell if the speech was funny or not. People are reading whatever into them -- they were mean-spirited, they were over the audience's head, they were badly delivered. But I can imagine them working or not working, depending on the circumstances.
So much of humor is "You had to be there."
Inga -
Rush is a Conservative, not a Republican.
The fact that you don't know that, says volumes about you.
Seeing Red said...
Who in their right mind would picture Nancy Pelosi & libido together? She's what one might use to control one's libido.
Palin & libido, however.....
Now, now! After all of Nancy's facelifts, there's bound to be somebody who finds nipples on clavicles sexy!
Someonehastosayit, blah blah blah, yeah right.
So who are conservatives going to vote for in 2016? A Democrat? A Libertarian? No, most conservatives will vote for a Republican. I can understand your need to seperate yourself from the GOP though.
Marty Allen used to consistently get laffs with "Hello dere".
Sometimes it is all about delivery.
Edwards does look great, but maybe she should dump Winstead.
Clyde quotes Stuart Smalley!
Stuart was a very funny character. His advice for Michael Jordan was classic!
http://screen.yahoo.com/daily-affirmation-michael-jordan-000000862.html
"Now look in the mirror ..."
Dang, I'm with Althouse on this.
Watch the video.
Her presentation kicked off with this. She killed. Srsly. Hilarious.
So, in the middle of a fit of turgid schadenfreude, I found myself wondering ... well, wtf? How could she have gone from that funny, funny video to a speech that bombed?
I think Althouse is right. I think she was genuinely funny in the speech and the audience was full of turds.
DC and the MSM. These are not people you would let your daughter marry.
Re: My heart — which, I must say, contains an element of palpable bitchery ....
Bless your heart.
Inga said...
Someonehastosayit, blah blah blah, yeah right.
So who are conservatives going to vote for in 2016? A Democrat? A Libertarian? No, most conservatives will vote for a Republican. I can understand your need to seperate yourself from the GOP though.
It's not a blah blah blah.
You are being intellectually lazy, dishonest, or both, by conflating Conservatives with Republicans and, most egregiously, something Rush said, to something you claim Huckabee said, and that Republicans believe.
That's nasty stuff, Inga. Lazy at best.
Ms. Edwards is a dead ringer for Jimmy "Dy No Mite" Walker in drag. I'll admit that her hair is shorter, her figure less developed and her teeth "buckier" but still. Aside from her laugh provoking appearance I couldn't find the humor. Upon reflection it was her not me. "Holla!"
Wrong speech, wrong audience...what could go wrong?
SHTSI said: That's nasty stuff, Inga. Lazy at best.
Don't you think that she loves to lie back and think of Ingaland given her druthers? She's receptive, not acceptive or conceptive, or deceptive or any of the other *ceptives
The D.C. press and wonks didn't know what to do without someone flashng the "Applause" and "Laugh" signs.
"Who's out to mess up her upward path in the political world?"
Well, since she's a black female, odds are on 2 choice:
1) she pissed off the LGBT folks
2) she pissed off the white feminists over the recent "white feminsist privilege broo-ha-ha.
In his speech to the Republican National Committee's winter meeting on Thursday, Huckabee said: “If the Democrats want to insult women by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”
Inga, I realize that sentence is a long one, and has punctuation. I can easily see how you may have gotten confused while trying to read the whole thing all at once. Here, let me help. Huckabee is saying that the Democrats are trying to make women believe that they -- women -- cannot control their own libidos. He believes this is insulting to women. His "so be it" is intended to be ironic. He is not affirming the view he attributed to the Democrats, nor is he condoning their attempt to convince women of that view. Rather, he is implying that you can't fix stupid. But we know that's not true, don't we, Inga?
Inga still believes in the "Skittles & Tea" myth. If you're going to attempt to deprogram her, you should at least get paid for it.
Unless she was already talking about Mike Huckabee, the reference was subtle enough that I don't see why people couldn't be fully aware of the Huckabee story and still not make the connection right away.
The Politico statement that the audience had to look it up the next day just means the politico author had to look it up the next day--not a snowball's chance in hell that she called sone of them the next day to check on their internet research. If they didn't get that line, then they forgot about it within minutes.
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