Here's Your Laugh

 New year. New attitude. 

Sorry. If you thought that something about the exchange of calendars was going to alter my perception of how to proceed in the coming year, I am going to disappoint you. 

I was watching an old interview with Jon Stewart in which Chris Wallace took him to task about his biases and those held by "the mainstream media." There was a lot of hay to be made by Mister Wallace about how disrespectful Stewart was to Fox News. At each moment that Wallace felt he had his prey cornered, there was comedian Jon Stewart, gleefully explaining the difference between comedy and news. If you are positioning yourself as "news," then you owe it to your audience to be as direct as possible. Just the facts, ma'am. 

However, if you happen to be playing for laughs, then you can be a little more fast and loose with the particulars. But then you run smack into the reality of the old saw: It's funny because it's true. This is the corner where I personally like to set up shop. When I sit down to type up one of these little bits, I am aiming for amusement. Sometimes I find myself working in darker or uncharted waters, and hope that I can find my way out. Mass shootings aren't funny by nature, but if there is a turn to be made that makes one turn on a phrase or a moment that takes them out of the horror to think about the reality being presented, I want to rub our collective noses in it. Just as hypocrisy abounds on both sides of the political aisle, but I find the more sanctimonious examples found on the Right to be tastier, if not simply easier to poke at. 

What you are reading here is not journalism. My degree is in creative writing. I would be uncomfortable referring to myself as a comedian, but I would gladly take that title ahead of being called a reporter. Just as I would never ask any of you to accept that I am being fair and balanced here. That, as Austin Powers might say, is not my bag. My job here is to point you all in the direction of what I find odd or distracting. 

Like the fact that after all his effort trying to shame Jon Stewart into being "just a comedian," in 2022 Chris Wallace left Fox News. Here's how he explained himself: “I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was January 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”

Now isn't that funny?