Q. Why did God give liberals annoying, whiny voices?
A. So that even the blind could hate them.
Q. Why did God give liberals annoying, whiny voices?
A. So that even the blind could hate them.
This is probably my favourite joke from a new book I just published in the US, (hence the use of ‘liberal’ in its American sense), called 365 Ways To Drive A Liberal Crazy. Though I don’t think it’s quite as funny as the Obama ‘Men Who Stare At Goats’ joke or the one about Nancy Pelosi and the sheep on the desert island, I like it a) because I invented it (or, rather, adapted it from an old Eighties racist joke) and b) because it offends so many liberal pieties.
Not only does it invoke God (in whom no liberals believe these days, not even Christian ones, they having all moved on to Gaia worship instead) but it takes it as read that He is a natural conservative (as indeed He is). And while it’s not necessarily rude about blind people, it does exploit their condition for the purposes of mirth, therefore making it at least to some small degree disablist, politically incorrect, tasteless and offensive. So win, win, win, win, win, win.
Whether the Americans enjoy it as much as I do is anybody’s guess. That’s the problem when writing for an audience which speaks superficially the same language but inhabits a different universe. Just when you think you’re beginning to get the measure of their humour, their ideology and their mores, you’ll innocently blurt out the wrong word and find yourself a character in the US equivalent of an H.M. Bateman cartoon.
Take that lovely word ‘twat’, for example, which in English English is now the kind of mild insult you’d reserve for someone somewhere between a plonker and a spazz.
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