This is found art — wordplay that appears by chance.
I was doing a word search in the OED, looking up "bedevil," because it had come up in an article I just blogged. The NYT writer crafted this sentence: "Was [Trump] upset that [Melania] had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe?" (Don't get me started on "thrust" and "globe.")
That blog post ends with a quote from Lord Byron, and I see the OED entry for "bedevil" also has a quote from Lord Byron — worrying about critics of "my poor, gentle, unresisting Muse, whom they have already so be-deviled with their ungodly ribaldry."
Have I been casually summoning up The Devil over the years by using this word that I like? Checking the 22-year blog archive, I see I've quoted it a few times and I've used it twice. Both times came in 2014. Once, in July, on the topic of ObamaCare:
I never take the bait anymore when headlines say things like...
• "As Trump courts their vote, comedian at his rally makes racist jokes about Latinos and Puerto Rico Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made crude jokes about Latinos having babies and called Puerto Rico a 'floating island of garbage,' drawing a rebuke from several Republicans" (NBC News)
• "Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks/A pro-Trump comedian’s racist diatribe drew widespread condemnation" (Politico)
• "Anti-Puerto Rico comments at Trump rally spur outrage as Bad Bunny supports Harris/The artist’s gesture of support came as a number of speakers at a Trump event in New York made racist and disparaging comments about Puerto Ricans and other Latinos" (WaPo)
• "A Trump Rally Speaker Trashed Puerto Ricans. Harris Reached Out to Them. Her campaign moved swiftly to highlight that even as a speaker at Donald Trump’s rally in New York made offensive remarks about Puerto Rico and Latinos, she was visiting Puerto Rican voters in Philadelphia" (NYT)
I started watching the rally at 4 Central Time — when I put up a post — so I hadn't seen the Hinchcliffe routine in real time. My first instinct was to watch the entire 12 minutes of his routine. Here. You can use the Althouse method of determining what somebody said. Listen to him, in context:
It seems to me that Hinchcliffe made some deliberately offensive jokes:
• "There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it's called Puerto Rico."
• "I think that Travis Kelce might be the next OJ Simpson."
• Purporting to see a black friend in the audience: "He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together."
• "Wars. It is unbelievable what's happening right now. It is incredible. Ukraine versus Russia. Israel/Palestine. It's like bad soccer games. Who even cares?"
It was as though he was challenging the crowd to guffaw and give Trump opponents the opportunity to accuse them of racism or whatever. He just went ahead and told those jokes.
He had 2 defenses ready to insert where needed. One was the conventional comedian's ploy of openly talking about how his jokes are failing. The crowd is tough. Or: This is the wrong crowd for this kind of material (which ought to absolve the Trumpers of agreeing with whatever racism inheres in those jokes (but won't)).
The other defense is to follow the offense with a sharp shift to a declaration about the importance of freedom of speech. This is the old Lenny Bruce move that takes risks. It was very hip and cool when Lenny Bruce did it, but it's hard to bring the whole world along with you if you try that. Ask Michael Richards. And Lenny Bruce paid for it in his own time.
It isn't really fair to deploy this comedic approach at somebody else's event, especially when it's really important and you know that person has antagonists who are standing by waiting to pounce on any material they can use to call him a racist. But maybe Trump wanted this kind of attention-getting edginess. Hinchcliffe has his fans. I bet Barron Trump is one of them. I've heard Trump say, more than once, that he takes advice from Barron about which comedians young people love.
Hinchcliffe had another comic move. With a foundation of failed jokes before the tough crowd, he was in position to comment when the crowd finally, genuinely responded with real spontaneous laughter at one of them. Here's that joke:
"It feels good in here. The other side's got a lot of crazy endorsements. Swift, Eminem, Leo DiCaprio, Beyonce. Every day the Democratic party looks more and more like a P Diddy party."
He said: "Oh oh okay okay — that's what you guys want all right. Heck yeah...."
What a no-good, terrible, confusing, stupid clue for a perfectly good insect. Does WASP mean "white Anglo-Saxon Protestant" here? If so ... WTF? No one used that term in the 19th century, so ... I mean, "inapt" doesn't even begin to cut it. I can only guess that this is the information at play in the non-WASP designation here:
Martin Van Buren was born on December 5, 1782, in the village of Kinderhook, New York about 20 miles (32 km) south of Albany on the Hudson River. Van Buren was the first President not born a British subject, or even of British ancestry. He was a descendant of Cornelis Maessen of the village of Buurmalsen, near the town of Buren in the Netherlands, who had come to North America in 1631 and purchased a plot of land on Manhattan Island; his son Martin Cornelisen took the surname Van Buren. (wikipedia)
No, wait, forget who knows or cares—even if you knew and cared, in what universe do you take your knowing and caring and turn it into a clue for, of all things, WASP, which is a pretty generic, and in my experience, at least mildly pejorative, term? Baffling. That was at 1-Across ... and the sourness never went away....
In the comments — this cracked me up — evil doug remembers the old "Seinfeld" dialogue:
KRAMER: Alright, so there I am at Lorenzo's - loading up my slice at the fixin's bar.. garlic and what-not... mmmm - and I see this guy over at the pizza boxes giving me the stink-eye. So I give him the crook-eye back, you know...Then, I notice that he's not alone! I'm taking on the entire Van Buren Boys!
JERRY: The Van Buren Boys? There's a street gang named after President Martin Van Buren?
KRAMER: Oh yeah, and they're just as mean as he was!
ADDED: Did you know that Martin Van Buren is the only U.S. President who did not have English as his first language? He was a native speaker of Dutch. I stumbled into that as I was retroactively adding my new tag "Van Buren" to old posts. I encountered this post from 2014 quoting John McWhorter as saying:
"In today’s America, to not be able to get down, or at least pretend to, is to be inarticulate. We live in a distinctly swaggery age. Obama, then, speaks a larger English than Romney – or Reagan, or Kennedy. It complements the fact that he is the first president since Martin Van Buren, who grew up speaking Dutch and broke into it when angry, to be raised in a household where more than just English was spoken. It’s stupid enough that Obama has to downplay his command of Indonesian to avoid looking like a Muslim; must we jump him for using the Black English spice kit?"
Does Obama speak Indonesian? CBS quoted him in July 2008 as saying: "I don't speak a foreign language. It's embarrassing!" Was he lying? This chart lists him as having "partial mastery" of Indonesian (and, interestingly, shows that we haven't had a President who was fluent in a foreign language since FDR).
"Some comics can do it magnificently with insights about socks, but the best do it with bracing commentary about the stuff that really matters to us. Sex, race, politics and religion have been the source of some of the best comedy I’ve seen, but the process of figuring out how to talk about difficult issues is going to involve errors that are potentially painful for people in the audience."
Writes the comedian Guy Branum, trying to help Trevor Noah off the hook for all the non-PC stuff in his Twitter archive.
By the way, "insights about socks" is a reference to Jerry Seinfeld. Many, many comedians over the years have observed that socks get lost in the laundry. But this is how you do it "magnificently":
ADDED: By the way, if Trevor Noah can be brushed off and set aright, can we bring back Michael Richards?
The coffee was not enough. I had to top it off with chocolate. And now more than an hour has passed since the first post of the day. I feel I should have served up some meaty political posts, delving into... oh, who knows?... some right-winger demanding that his crowd get heated up over the income tax in New York, which is causing him to abscond to Florida... or some left-winger assuring his flock that the John Doe investigation is really, really, probably going to get Scott Walker, just you wait. But I did not do that. My words did not go down on this blog. They evanesced. There is no archive, only vague memories of a conversation. What on earth did we talk about?
Ah! I remember. The conversation started with the observation that in blogging, there is always one post on top of the other, the new surmounting and obliterating the old. I'd been blogging about betamax3000's elaborate "Desolation Row" parody, about which he'd said, at last night's Bookshelf Café:
I Would Like to Think 'Internet meme Row' Will Inspire in Althouse a Sunday Morning Proustian Memory Flow, but - Alas - It Will probably Just be Swept Along With All of Yesterday's Other Pixels.
The Internet Paints Over Itself Each and Every Day.
And I was saying — to Meade, here in nonvirtual reality — that's a subject that bedeviled me in the early days of this blog. Like here, I'm chiding myself in 2005 for taking the trouble to update something written in 2004: "Don't I realize the old posts sink into oblivion? These old posts don't really exist at all." I visualized each new post physically weighing upon the posts underneath, pressing them endlessly into the murk.
Now, I tend to think — and this was the beginning of the hour-long conversation — that blogging is like life itself, with everything happening now, here in person, but better, because we can all talk at once, have the feeling of immediacy and spontaneity, and still be able to hear each other, almost in the present, and because of the archive, at any time, if we happen to care to listen to what has gone before.
I imagined a theater full of 2,000 people, with everyone talking out loud, expressing their thoughts at once. No one would hear what anyone was saying and it would just be an annoying variation of everyone sitting there silently and thinking. Blogging is the equivalent of having the superpower to go to everyone in that theater and close enough to hear that person and to repeat time, the same few seconds, over and over, until you'd gotten around to everyone and heard what each one had to say. No, it's even better than that, because you have a way to find the words you'd most like to hear, and to jump from one part of the theater to another at will.
You might think it would be better to write a book, that could exist and last and be read for 100 years, but perhaps in that 100 years, there would be no more readers than will read this blog post in the next 2 hours. And what of this conversation — this conversation from an hour ago, which I wasn't planning to blog about — this conversation that evanesced? There's no archive at all, unless I can pull it out of my memory and blog it now. There was all that and many more observations, including much talk of this panel discussion of 4 comedians where (at some point) they get to the topic of using what I will refer to as "the N-word"...
... and we talked about what it means to be "edgy," the subjectiveness of the edge with respect to comedy as opposed to the edge in slope snowboarding (and our own subjectiveness about what we were calling "the edge" as we nearly got into an argument), and how Michael Richards got into trouble by thinking he could be Lenny Bruce (and what was it Lenny Bruce did anyway? was it the same as the way Dustin Hoffman did it in "Lenny"? (NSFW)), and how comedians in a panel discussion are not the same as comedians doing standup, and panel discussions seem like they are supposed to be friendly conversation, but really involve a lot of competitive hostility, which maybe is what Chris Rock was doing to Louis CK in that part of the panel discussion that Meade described, but I still haven't watched, but I've been on plenty of academic panel discussions and I have a bit of a superpower to detect passive aggression, and that's why I like to do things in writing, from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, where the second post of the day, 2 hours after the first, is way overdue.
Last night's new episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" — which has been working the "Seinfeld" reunion theme all season — finally got around to doing something with the painful subject of Michael Richards's disgrace over the shouting of racial epithets at some hecklers in a comedy club. Spoiler:
After learning that he suffers from the fictional Groat's disease (last mentioned in Season 2 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), Michael Richards once again finds himself in the line of fire for a racially fueled attack on an African American ... who just happens to be Larry's house guest Leon (the always hysterical J.B. Smoove), who posed as Groat's disease sufferer Danny Duberstein but who looked more like Louis Farrakhan from the Nation of Islam than a Jewish CPA.
Skewering Richards' brush with notoriety, Larry David has Richards angrily confront Leon in full view of several dozen camera phones, leading to him proclaiming that he wished he could call Leon a word that would make him as angry as he was right then. It's a savage parody of Richards' race-fueled rant to an African American heckler during a 2006 stand-up performance ... which happened to be captured on a cellphone.
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