Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Good morning.
In what seems like a lifetime 30 years ago, I was an editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Among my editorial duties in the newsroom was supervising the newspaper’s talented stable of columnists, several of whom specialized in writing humor.
I quickly learned that humor columnists resisted supervision, which was likely the source of their humor (though I seldom thought it was funny then). Yet even on the worst days, I valued their zany perspectives and above all, their humor. Our readers did too.
Today, few newspapers employ humor columnists. The best of the breed, the Miami Herald’s Pulitzer-Prize winning syndicated columnist Dave Barry, quit writing humor in 2005. Barry always had great comedic timing, so he must have anticipated where things were headed.
The only humor you’ll get now from the legacy news media is reading its cockeyed coverage. The information it provides on most subjects is surely hysterical, and I don’t mean funny. That’s because objectivity and impartiality were also thrown under the bus along with humor as journalism lost its wheels.
Which brings me to my subject today. One of the great tragedies of modern times is our collective inability to laugh.
Coming from an Irish upbringing (in which humor and the ability to tell a joke and laugh at it was held in very high regard), I find this humor deficiency lamentable.
It’s lamentable because humor is, from my perspective, a key to healthy and happy living.
Humor was once a central force in American life.
Consider the positive impact that comedy classics of yesteryear had on our collective cultural experience. Shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, All in the Family, The Tonight Show (especially when Johnny Carson and successor Jay Leno were hosting it; here’s Leno talking about caring for his wife with Alzheimer’s), Saturday Night Live (in its prime), Cheers, Seinfeld, and Everybody Loves Raymond.
The great comedies and comedians of the past helped us form a more positive and reasonable outlook on life. They fostered consensus and the common weal.
Contrast that with today’s obsession with “reality,” which offer us a steady diet of dystopia, dyspepsia, and dysphoria. One result of this trend is that we are comedy depleted. We’ve forgotten how to laugh.
One exception is the 2-minute sketch below from the comedy group Foil Arms and Hogg out of Ireland. In the sketch, they pretend to be three Irish Cardinals conspiring to elect the first Irish Pope. It was produced before Pope Leo XIV emerged two weeks ago on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as the first American-born pontiff.
Reacting to Pope Leo’s surprise election, online wags declared: “Tariffs are working. Even the Pope is made in America.”
I also got a laugh out of this item (shown below). From the Babylon Bee, it’s a spoof on an actual 12-foot bronze statue that was unveiled on May 8 in New York City’s Times Square. The statue depicts a much larger than lifesize Black woman with her hands on her hips.
In the same Times Square, there’s another statue of a Roman Catholic priest, Father Francis Duffy. The most highly decorated cleric in the history of the United States Army, Father Duffy served as chaplain of the “Fighting 69th,” an infantry unit in World War I made up mostly of Irish Americans. Their story was immortalized in the 1940 movie The Fighting 69th, starring James Cagney with Pat O’Brien as Father Duffy.
But there’s nothing discernibly heroic about the unidentified statuesque Black woman.
According to the artist who designed it, “Grounded in the Stars” is supposed to combat racism. But it has instead sparked intense mockery on the Left for promoting stereotypes about women of color, and on the Right for being just plain silly.
As the Babylon Bee sees it, the statue is a huge target (literally) for amusement, at the expense of New York State Attorney General (and Trump arch enemy) Letitia James. She was one of this country’s top scolds, until her own alleged improprieties emerged recently, which the Trump Justice Department is seeking to prosecute.
While New York’s best-known statue is of course Lady Liberty, the virtues we celebrate in statues today hardly seem virtuous.
Our humor too is a relic of the Stone Age. As smartphones, social media, scolds and divided politics have become our dominant cultural influences, it is irrefutable that we’ve become more humorless.
Who can possibly consume today’s news media and not feel browbeaten by its lack of humor and the censorious attitudes it promotes?
That’s not the attitude Scripture tells us we are to embrace. We are supposed to be overflowing with optimism, joy and good humor.
As Pastor Nate Devlin said eloquently in his two most recent sermons on Isaiah 52-53 (found here and here), being a Christian means embracing joy. We should yearn for Jesus’ return, not fear it. We should embrace life, not fear it. To me, that means maintaining one’s balance and perspective, and laughing whenever laughter is appropriate (it often is). Humor helps you do that.
With the above as my operating premise, I’d like to highlight a few items I have found particularly funny and absurd in my monthly romp through the news.
A few ground rules before we get started. This column is meant to be funny (in keeping with the subject matter). A Presbyterian writing for other Presbyterians (mostly) about humor might seem oxymoronic. We’re not called the “frozen chosen” for nothing.
I was raised in northern New Jersey (a very funny place), in an Irish Catholic home but among many Jewish school mates, so that’s sufficient grounds for having a sense of humor. But you’ll be the judge.
Since leaving “the Roman Church,” my own Methobapterian progression has exposed me to many flavors of Christian faith. Based on past experience, I’d say Protestants are the least funny, Jews the most (except at the New York Times), with Catholics falling somewhere in between.
Our national political landscape certainly offers endless comedic opportunities these days.
I was saddened to read the news bulletin on my phone late Sunday of Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis. Though prostate cancer is quite treatable if caught early, the prognosis for this form of cancer is difficult at best. It is Stage 4 and seldom curable as it has spread to his bones.
A relative in my family has the same diagnosis, so I have empathy for former President Biden. I pray that God eases his pain and the ravages of this most aggressive type of prostate cancer.
Political divisions should never make us unkind or cruel toward those who suffer. All too often, though, that boundary is crossed.
The state of Biden’s health as President was the source of widespread speculation for years, but seldom reported upon.
Earlier this month, before his cancer was disclosed, Biden (flanked by wife Jill) sought to defend himself on The View in advance of new revelations about his condition while in office. The revelations are contained in a book to be released today, Original Sin.
Co-written by CNN’s Jake Tapper, the book details Biden’s infirmities while President, and how people in his inner circle were not candid or honest about this subject. The book includes that his team planned for Biden to be in a wheelchair if he’d been reelected (ala Franklin Delano Roosevelt).
Given that Jake Tapper was among those who repeatedly and combatively denied claims that Biden’s health was failing in office, Tapper’s newfound rectitude would be funny if it weren’t so sad. This latest turn of events seems consistent with journalism’s modern standards of outright duplicity and favoritism (especially when it favors them).
Then there’s President Trump.
The succession from the infirm Joe Biden to the hyperactive Donald Trump is so jarring it qualifies as absurdity of Mount Rushmore proportion.
My general observation about our 47th (and 45th) President is that when he talks off-the-cuff about annexing the Panama Canal or Greenland, making Canada a 51st state, or reopening the federal prison at Alcatraz, he speaks too speculatively at times. We need to take him seriously (sometimes) but not necessarily literally.
On the other hand, our very active President is a constant source of humor and amusement. Trump often causes me to think or laugh. I’m not poking fun at him observing this. Contrary to popular opinion, I think he is a very funny man.
Surely I jest? No, not at all. Consider the video below in which a reporter asks Mr. Trump a very dumb question.
Reporter: “Mr. President, who do you think should be the next Pope?”
Trump didn’t call the reporter out for asking a dumb question. To his credit, he instead offered a playful response.
“I’d like to be Pope,” the President said smiling. “That would be my No. 1 choice.”
Does anyone doubt Trump would like to be Pope? Of course he would. Especially considering the relentless demands of the job he’d presumably vacate (though perhaps he was suggesting he’d be both President and Pope simultaneously?).
The advantages of being Pope over President are clear. I imagine he has a parade of deputies jabbing him at night saying, “Mr. President, we have a problem.”
If he were Pope Donaldo I (he’d have to be the first whatever name he took), he’d have subordinates who at least let him finish breakfast before starting the workday.
There are other obvious advantages to being head of the Holy See. Not the least is the unswerving loyalty and respect he’d be shown by his 1.4 billion followers. He’d like that. Catholics are a more obedient group than U.S. citizens.
Trump seems captivated by the size of things, and 1.4 billion is a far bigger flock than the 262 million American adults he commands (some of whom loathe him on any given day).
In addition, the Pope can eat with anyone he pleases without being compared to Hitler.
This is a reference to comedian Bill Maher’s recent dinner with President Trump (cited in last month’s report).
Maher declared his White House date to have been surprisingly pleasant, which apparently enraged comedian Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld. David, a man who used to be funny, then penned “My dinner with Adolf,” published in the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper.
I suppose Larry David thought he was being “funny,” but comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler doesn’t strike me as legitimate satire in any context. I think most people would concur, Jews especially.
I realize that in our current environment, the Left thinks comparisons to Hitler are radically chic. Even Trump confidant Elon Musk has been compared to Hitler (for his supposed Nazi salute).
Last month I wrote about my wife’s grandfather, who was General George Patton’s chief signal corps officer during World War II. When General Hammond died in 1990, we discovered original military photographs in his basement that had been taken of the Nazi concentration camps when Patton and his Third Army liberated several of them in 1945. We shipped them off to the Army War College in Carlisle for preservation.
The scenes depicted in these ghastly photos were so horrifying and inhumane that they defy comparison to anything I’ve seen before or since. Comparing Donald Trump to Hitler is morally obtuse. There is no justifiable equivalency between what I viewed in those photos and the actions of Donald Trump. To allege otherwise trivializes and minimizes the horror of what Hitler actually did when he brutally murdered six million Jews.
Only hysterical scolds do not understand this. They think they are employing a clever rhetorical device (or perhaps worse still, they truly believe Trump is comparable to Hitler). But words create worlds, as Pastor Nate likes to say. And the world created by such comparisons is one without moral discernment.
When I read the Times these days, I observe far too many examples of morality unbound. Sadly (and I say sadly because the United States needs a Fourth Estate that is a guardian of truth, not the partisan and enfeebled institution we have now), the Times is a mere shadow of the newspaper it once was. Because Donald Trump is their sworn adversary, anything goes.
If you think I’m exaggerating about the Times, consider the hysterical (and I don’t mean funny) headline atop Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s April 15 column.
Here is the actual headline as it ran in the Times (and I am not making this up, a line popularized by former humor columnist Dave Barry, one of the funniest men I’ve ever met).
The Friedman headline read: “I have never been more afraid for my country’s future.” This piece of genius ran the week before “My dinner with Adolf.”
Heads therefore must have exploded in the Times newsroom when the former newspaper ran this story which was headlined:
White House of Worship:
Trump Elevates Christian Prayer and PowerEvangelical leaders are relishing the new atmosphere
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – and greater access to the president.
The report included the photo below as well as this paragraph, which conveyed encouraging information I was not aware of:
“The language and rituals of the White House are changing. The first Cabinet meeting opened with prayer ‘in Jesus’ name.’ Prayer sessions and even hymn-singing have broken out in the West Wing, in public and in private.”
With scolds comparing our President to Hitler, is it any wonder Trump might occasionally muse about alternative employment as Pope?
As a lifetime appointment, the Pope has no voters to satisfy or members of Congress seeking to impeach him.
There was only one problem with this momentary fantasy.
While Trump may be a believer (see photo above), he doesn’t check the first and most essential box for candidacy as Pope. He is not Roman Catholic. (Trump grew up Presbyterian, attended Sunday school as a child, and was confirmed in the PCUSA denomination in 1959.)
While I am aware that Catholic progressives want to “reform” the Roman Church, I doubt electing a non-Catholic is the sort of reform they have in mind.
Nor was the White House seeking to advance Trump’s candidacy for Pope when it distributed the photo (shown in the video below) of Trump in papist garb. Clearly labeled AI generated, I thought this image was laugh-out-loud funny when I saw it.
But NBC News (of course) averred. “This post by President Trump is stirring up all kinds of controversy,” correspondent Anne Thompson “reported.”
Really? All kinds of controversy? If there truly was, I think those who were offended need a more robust sense of humor.
Based on the breathless tone of the NBC report and other outlets, you’d have thought the Swiss Guard (that’s the soldiers who protect the Pope) was about to take up arms against the United States.
More than anything, the incident yet again demonstrates Trump’s idiosyncrasies. Unlike other politicians, he says what he thinks, which endears him to his supporters.
But it also shows how quickly the news media is to jump to the worst possible interpretation of everything Trump utters – and its stunning lack of humor.
The problem the news media has created for itself is that by falsely claiming everything is borderline apocalyptic – “I have never been more afraid for my country’s future” – what do you say when there may be legitimate reasons to be afraid?
Friedman might then write: “I have never, ever, ever been more afraid for my country’s future. And this time I really mean it.”
The polling data on news media credibility (see graph below) is absolutely atrocious. Only 31% of the public (according to the latest Gallup survey, released last September) have a great deal (8%) or fair amount (23%) of trust and confidence in what the news media tells them.
In other words, the public in overwhelming numbers has come to regard the news media as the boy who cries wolf so often, it cannot be believed.
Commenting on this survey, Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post’s owner who also owns Amazon (the online retail colossus you may have heard of) last October warned his Post employees that they needed to take very seriously being “the least trusted of all” professions. Even Congress (and used car salesmen) are more trusted now than journalists, according to the Gallup survey.
Bezos wrote: “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.”
One third of the public trust the news media, the poll said, meaning two-thirds do not. This is reverse of the situation a half century ago. There’s been a steady decline in trust since then. Needless to say, this is not a healthy situation.
The tone of anti-Trump epithets – “he’s a Nazi, fascist, tyrant” – has become beyond hysterical of late, especially at the New York Times and especially since the Trump administration’s recent confrontation with Ivy League schools over their collective embrace of antisemitism and other lunacies.
In taking on the Ivy League, Trump has gone into the “belly of the beast,” the intellectual nerve center of radical progressivism in America today. The nexus of that radicalism happens to be the New York Times and the Ivy League. Not surprisingly, they have intensified their rhetoric against him in response.
Consider this video from the Times last week which features academics at Yale University talking about the similarities between Nazi Germany in the 1930s and what the Trump administration is doing.
The video drips with hate and fear. And when so-called “experts” dispense such vitriol-laced sentiment as matter-of-factly as they do in this video, it permits others who feel justified when they dispense hatred toward the President and his policies, and even harbor it.
Assassins twice sought to kill President Trump last year on the campaign trail. One recent study found that an “assassination culture” is starting to take root on the hard Left since those failed attempts.
Witness the support that Luigi Mangione has cultivated recently. Mangione, who faces trial soon for assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December, has become a folk hero to his supporters online.
The Mangione case is hard to fathom. He was videotaped walking right up to Thompson in Manhattan and shooting him in the back. Mangione appears to have been motivated by resentment over what he called “parasitic” health insurance companies.
That’s deranged enough. But equally unhinged is the cult-like following he’s attracted from supporters who, incredibly, defend the indefensible.
For all the escalating talk about Trump being a “fascist” and “threat to democracy,” from my perspective he seems like a very law-abiding fascist.
Even in the face of many adverse court rulings – some of which seemingly overstep the rule of law – Trump has accepted them.
The same cannot be said of some judges. Consider this absurd case that emerged last month in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.
There, Judge Hannah Dugan was indicted last week by a federal grand jury on charges of concealing an undocumented immigrant from arrest and obstructing federal immigration proceedings.
Despite the protesters who have claimed she is a hero, the court record describes actions which were clearly illegal, and particularly inappropriate for a judge overseeing the very case that triggered her own indictment.
The events occurred on April 18. Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican citizen here illegally, was present in her courtroom with his lawyer for a hearing on criminal charges against him for assault and battery on his wife.
According to the meticulously detailed 12-page criminal complaint against Judge Dugan (found here, which I have read in its entirety), agents from several federal agencies (including the FBI and ICE) showed up outside Judge Dugan’s Milwaukee courtroom in April. When the judge was informed that the feds were waiting outside the courtroom (a public place) to serve Flores-Ruiz with a warrant for his arrest, she became visibly angry.
She told the chief agent they had the wrong arrest warrant and needed to speak to the Chief Judge. The hearing was then abruptly cancelled as Judge Dugan was observed talking to Flores-Ruiz and his attorney.
While the chief agent was diverted speaking to the Chief Judge about the warrant, Judge Dugan was seen leading Flores-Ruiz and his attorney through a back door that permitted him to escape. He was pursued on foot by the agents outside the Milwaukee courthouse, and captured shortly thereafter.
Judge Dugan has been temporarily removed from the bench and plans to fight the charges.
Or consider a recent CNN report, which incredibly asks its viewers to have sympathy for the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico. We’re supposed to sympathize with ruthless monsters who routinely hang the dead bodies of their victims from bridges?
Here’s the scoop on this doozy of journalistic rot and ethical decay.
The news network sent a reporting crew to an undisclosed Mexican city to interview a member of the cartel, which produces deadly fentanyl and trafficks it into our country.
In the CNN video, you see a reporter asking the cartel representative: “The Mexican military are making a big effort to crack down on the drug production here. How are you responding to that, and how does that impact your work?”
She asked more questions, like: “According to the Trump administration, you are a terrorist. The cartels have been labeled foreign terrorist organizations. What do you make of that?” The cartel representative responds: “Well, the situation is ugly, but we have to eat.”
Yup, even drug pushers gotta eat. They particularly like devouring those whose addictions they feast on.
The report triggered this reaction from one outraged viewer: “CNN is now trying to humanize the cartel in order to push back against President Trump. You don’t hate the media nearly enough.”
None of the above items are funny, but they surely qualify as absurd. They also are true.
Truth matters when folks on the Left falsely allege that a judge who didn’t observe the law is being “locked up” because our President is a tyrant and fascist. Or when the news media tells us drug pushers deserve our “sympathy.”
I went to great lengths to verify that the details of both of the cases described above are true. Or as humor columnist Dave Barry might have said, “I am not making this up.” I wish I were making it up.
That’s my report for the very merry month of May.
I am taking the summer off. I’ll return again in September, God willing.
Summer is a time for rest and recuperation. You have earned a vacation from this report, and I have too.
Have a great summer, and be of good cheer! Remember the words of humorist Mark Twain who said: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Nothing except God.