"The reason to bring up 'Porky’s' now is the laughter — the uproarious laughter. Last week, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was asked..."

"... what she most remembered about the night she says Brett M. Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her, she offered, with some quavering, that it was the laughter between Mr. Kavanaugh and his friend. She told the Senate Judiciary Committee: 'indelible in the hippocampus' — Dr. Blasey’s a professor of psychology — 'is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense," writes Wesley Morris in an article on the front page of nytimes.com right now, "In ’80s Comedies, Boys Had It Made. Girls Were the Joke."

Why talk about "Porky's" when Kavanaugh mentioned 3 movies of the time that influenced him and his friends: "Animal House," "Caddyshack," and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"? Well, it's the movie that the NYT critic Wesley Morris "suddenly found" his "mind... on a journey back to."

Morris brings up a number of other 80s movies that centered on young men: “Risky Business,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Three O’Clock High,” “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Bad Boys,” “Hot Pursuit,” “Weird Science,” “Teen Wolf,” “License to Drive.” “The Secret of My Success,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Soul Man,” “Losin’ It,” “The Last American Virgin,” “Stripes,” “Sharky’s Machine.” “Stakeout,” “Like Father, Like Son,” “Big,” “Goonies," and "Zapped."

Is there any evidence that Kavanaugh even saw these movies? Morris makes this very loose connection: "From the sounds of what Judge Kavanaugh has disclosed about his high school and college self, he seemed part of that landscape." Morris does name the 3 movies Kavanaugh mentioned, and Morris goes so far as admitting that "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (a movie made by a woman) "could be construed as feminist."

Speaking of feminism, Morris remembers "Carrie," the 1976 movie in which a high school girl, enraged when her classmates all laugh at her, uses her telekinesis to (spoiler alert) kill them all.

Morris cannot resist asserting that men are laughing at Christine Blasey Ford now!

At a rally the other day in Mississippi, the president lampooned Dr. Blasey to big cheers. Even now, men are laughing at her.

It seems to me people took Christine Blasey Ford extremely seriously. We've been talking about her for over a week, giving her the top spot in the news, after she came forward with an uncorroborated memory fragment from 1982. Kavanaugh was mocked for showing emotion in response to the ugly accusation, but Ford was held immune from comedy. Trump mocked her statements, playing up their fragmentary nature, but he didn't imitate her voice or call her names or talk about how she looked and acted. She was not mocked. "Saturday Night Live" did a 13-minute cold open about the hearing and Ford wasn't even one of the characters! Only Kavanaugh was ridiculed.

Laughter is an interesting topic, and I like the idea of taking "a journey back" to the 1980s and to examine how young men laughed at the expense of women, especially with the inclusion of "Carrie," the movie about a young woman committing mass murder because she was laughed at. That's a fascinating parallel to Christine Blasey Ford!

What's the right kind of laughter? And what's the right amount? If the new idea is no laughing at the expense of women, it's not going to work (as Trump obviously knows and will use against all the no-laughing! crowd).

They're all going to laugh at you!!!

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A closer look at my sense of humor.

As you can see in the previous post, I saw a George Bernard Shaw play — "Heartbreak House" — at a lovely outdoor theater yesterday. The excellent cast gave a fine performance and got quite a few laughs. I laughed. It was a comedy, based on the style of Anton Chekhov and also inspired by the 1874 painting "The North-West Passage/It might be done and England should do it."



Anyway. Though I laughed a sort of abstracted intellectual laugh during the play and appreciated it silently much of the time, there was something I saw and thought after the play that reduced me to flat-out hysteria.

I was walking down the path from the theater in the woods on the hill, down toward the parking lot with the rest of the crowd, and in front of me was a young man in a leather jacket that has 2 words painted on the back of it. He had a blanket or something slung over he shoulder. (It was a bit cold, and many people had blankets.) So I couldn't read the entire words, just the ends of the words. I saw "-ORM" above "-OW." I tried to think of what he might have written there, and I figured that "-OW" was "NOW," and it was a political slogan. He wanted something, and he wanted it now. Like Jim Morrison:



So what was it he wanted with this primal urgency? "-ORM"? I thought: REFORM. And the idea of "REFORM NOW" as a political slogan cracked me up to the point of insanity. It's like shouting "Give me moderation or give me death!" "Reform" is just too dull of a wish to demand it NOW!

I was lost in hilarity when the man whipped the blanket off his shoulder and revealed the 2 words. Suddenly the impossibly dull political demand was a blatant, far-off mistake, which only made it funnier to me, especially in contrast to the real words, which were for me nonsense — "STORM CROW." Nonsense is funny too.  You don't get nonsense when you always have the internet at your fingertips, but I did not have it there as I was dissolving in laughter on that hill. To me STORM CROW was just a new way to shout REFORM NOW!

In the clear light of morning, internet at my fingertips, I see the boring information that Storm Crow is a character in "Magic: The Gathering," and "Magic: The Gathering" is a trading card game. There are over 20 billion "Magic: The Gathering" trading cards out there. That's all news to me.  Maybe if you saw "-ORM/-OW" on a young man's leather jacket, you'd figure right off it was "STORM CROW." But I had my 2 minutes of high amusement trying to think what sort of person would get so intense about reform, that he might caterwaul — in the Jim Morrison mode — We want reform and we want it... NOW!!!!!

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"We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy. We reject the ideology of globalism and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism."

Trump at the U.N. today.

I'm reading the NYT article about it.

Mr. Trump’s message drew a mostly stone-faced response from the audience in the General Assembly chamber. But there was one moment of levity, albeit at the president’s expense. When he declared that his administration “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country,” the audience broke out into murmurs and laughter.

Pausing, Mr. Trump said, “I did not expect that reaction.” Then he added, “But that’s O.K.”

"But that's O.K." is Trump's standard phrase when he's acknowledging a statement that he does not like. It's not really okay. It's more: I see that, and I'm not going to take the bait and talk about it now.

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