When the Prince of Darkness died, I commented, “Good riddance. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way to Hell.” It was Chilon of Sparta who once said that one should not speak ill of the dead, but I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t speaking of people like Robert Novak.
With all the words I have written here, some readers may consider them in bad taste and others, spot on. That said, even though a few of my words may be over the top, I do think I’m a bit old-fashioned — not 2,500 years old-fashioned — on what makes me laugh. Not funny: Holocaust and 9/11 jokes are out along with misogynistic one-liners. Funny: puns and biting quotes. Regarding puns, a man once was asked if puns were the lowest forms of wit, he replied, “It is, and therefore the foundation of all wit.” Yes, puns are their own reword.
And a good quote is just as tremendous, such as this one from Adlai Stevenson, “I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends… that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”
And even from across the aisle, conservatives have been known for a good quote. Here’s one from the Quipster himself, Ronald Reagan, “History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”
It turns out that one of our frequent conservative commenters at Delaware Liberal enjoys word play as well. However, he likes to use word play when talking of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has killed more than 25 million people since 1981. He likes word play, specifically using the word buggery, when commenting on the disease that afflicts some 33 million people world-wide — half of those people are women. He writes that “Words can be the source of fun” as he writes about HIV/AIDS that, in 2007, killed some 2 million people and, of those, 250,000 were children.
Call me conservative if you will, but word play is not appropriate for the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It might even be construed as homophobic in origin. To bastardize Voltaire, “A witty saying proves nothing, but an unwitty saying proves everything.”