Gag Us With a Spoon

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we’re taking it slow as we recover from a brief illness. We wish the First Lady of the United States would help us out, but alas, it’s not to be: she apparently wants our stomachs to stay upset.

Yes, Laura Bush got up in front of a bunch of famous people at a White House Correspondents’ dinner over the weekend and told some off-color jokes about her life in Washington. Like, she joked about going to see male strippers with Lynne Cheney, and how the President once tried to milk a male horse.

We here at the Blasphemy Blog are definitely Democrats, but we try to be thoughtful and not engage in ad hominem attacks against people “on the other side of the aisle,” as it were. So we want it to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with Laura Bush telling off-color jokes, because blue humor knows no partisan affiliation.

That doesn’t change the fact, however, that our reaction to this news story was one word, and that word was, quote, “Eeeeeww.”

It’s not fair, we know, we know. Republicans should be allowed to make stripper jokes every now and then. It is true that lots of TV conservatives appear to have had their senses of humor surgically removed, but the Blasphemy Blog’s experience is that most people, even people who believe that women should keep their skirts below the knee, like a good stripper joke now and then.

So what keeps us from laughing along with the First Lady? Is our heart so poisoned with partisanship that we cannot appreciate good comedy when we hear it?

Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps we just need to cool it, and try to enjoy the First Lady’s jokes as jokes, rather than try to interpret them as some kind of attempt to charm the public as her husband sinks in the polls a little bit. Perhaps, if we were to peruse the First Lady’s remarks one more time, we could find the humor and enjoy it without worrying that our lunch would repeat on us. But that would mean reading all those jokes over again. And frankly, given our still-shaky state, we would rather not.