PLACE

Wealth: The current financial crisis has certainly pulled the curtain down on much of this illusion. Even if a person has a negative net worth or is even a breath away from bankruptcy, they can still appear wealthy. Ironically, this diminishes the value of material wealth.

The Best Thing I Read Today

Jeff Dunham’s Comedy For Dummies from the NY Times Sunday Magazine

Gradually, a lot of Dunham’s material has come to reflect his exhaustion with political correctness — though he needles taboos in the same impish way that his dummies used to cut down untouchables like the lunch lady or Jack Welch when he was a kid. Unlike the acts of some other comedians with a big red-state following, Dunham’s doesn’t feel resentful or vindictive, and he’s not eager to brand himself ideologically. His outlook struck me as almost alarmingly uncomplicated. He defends himself by noting that he tries to insult all races and ethnicities equally, and ultimately seems to treat jokes about all Indians being customer-service operators or all black people drinking malt liquor not all that differently from jokes involving other well-worn comedic tropes — like all wives being annoying nags or Florida being way too humid.

Dunham does concede that he’s extra-sensitive to one of his largest constituencies: the conservative “country crowd.” “That’s why I don’t pick on basic Christian-values stuff,” he told me. “Well, I also don’t like to, because that’s the way I was brought up.” He then stopped himself short and said: “Oh, boy. I’m walking into something here.”

Dunham started to explain — as if realizing it for the first time — that this would appear to make the jokes he does about Islam with Achmed “hypocritical.” But he quickly unburdened himself of the idea. “I try to make the majority of my audience laugh,” he said. “That’s my audience. They’ll laugh at the dead terrorist.”

In fact, the jokes that get some of the wildest, loudest reactions aren’t really even jokes, just statements. Like when one puppet shouts that all Mexicans should learn English, or when Dunham wishes Walter “Happy Holidays” and Walter responds: “I’ve been wanting to say this for a couple of years now: Screw you, it’s ‘Merry Christmas’!” And the crowd doesn’t laugh; it riotously applauds. Dunham describes them as moments of “catharsis,” when the dummy says something “everyone wants to laugh about, or that you snicker at with one or two friends, but that you could never say out loud.”

Plenty of more gems in this article.