A stand up comic exposes how bizarre and indefensible the woke values of Lindsay Clancy-supporting progressives are. It is also a wonderful demonstration of how the cognitive dissonance scale works…
From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…
Humor and Satire
Ethics Meme of the Year
I wish I had the gust to post this on Facebook. And the fact that I know that it would upset so many of my long-time friends is itself an indication of how ethically warped the political Left has become. In fact, “ethically warped” is a euphemism for a far more damning and accurate term.
[This one is pretty funny too, but it’s not really an ethics meme…]
Ethics Quiz: Sydney Sweeney (Again)
Sweeney, the shapely and bold young actress who already angered the Left with her jeans/genes ad that supposedly dog whistled white supremacy, is now getting attacked by the Mad Left for the video above. She’s objectifying female athletes, you see. Or something. Because women athletes have never used sexual attractiveness to promote themselves and their sports…
Hey, how did pro-golfer Paige Spiranac get in there? Away with you, Devil Woman!
Now where were we? Oh yes, Sydney Sweeney….
The Ritz Brothers and The Duty To Remember
I have several of these posts on the EA runway, but I’ve been thinking about posting on the Ritz Brothers for an especially long time.
I mysteriously started getting Turner Classic Movies again from DirecTV several months ago without having it in my package. (“We do that sometimes” was the explanation I got when I asked the satellite service about it.) I had started using a lesser package for economy reasons following the near collapse of my company as a result of what I will forever call “The Stupid Lockdown.” TCM is the cinema equivalent of my now defunct professional regional theater company, “The American Century Theater,” which mounted stage productions that had cultural significance but that the more practical companies never present any more. Since the channel’s return I have been struck by how many major talents have been almost completely forgotten despite the fact that 1) they were once very famous and popular and 2) they deserved to be.
The video above is probably the quickest way to get a crash course in Ritz Brothers lore. In one of the clips in the video , Dick Cavett introduces a segment of his show by saying that “today” most people under the age of 40 probably have never heard of the Ritz Brothers. That “today” was in the 1980s. I have never received a positive response from anyone I have asked about the brothers. Yet The Ritz Bothers, which can best be described as a spectacular vaudeville act that peaked in films in the Thirties and Forties and then almost totally avoided TV while starring in nightclubs, were memorable. Unlike the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges, two other trios whose cultural legacy is more secure, the Ritz Brothers did not highlight individual members of their team but rather emphasized remarkable unity and coordination. They danced, they sang, they did carefully choreographed physical comedy and slapstick, and were almost completely indistinguishable. Almost. Harry, “the One in the Middle,” clearly had an extra measure of presence and charisma, and it is he who is most cited by succeeding generations of comics as an icon.
Comedy historian Anthony Scibelli writes,
Baseball Ethics Quiz: The Hug
Peyton Tolle is a Boston Red Sox rookie and already a team mate and fan favorite for his big extrovert personality that matches his huge frame (6’6,” about 260 pounds), highlighted by Tolle’s obvious joy at playing a kid’s game for a living.
In yesterday’s Red Sox 9-8 extra-innings win over the Seattle Mariners (The Red Sox are having one of their most entertaining seasons ever), Tolle, was Boston’s starting pitcher, did something that nobody could recall any previous major league baseball player doing. As you can see above, when the hulking Tolle went to tag out Mariners player Dominic Canzone on the first base line after fielding a bouncer back to him on the mound, he preceded his tag with a smile and a hug.
Some old timers gag when they see opposing team players even chatting cordially at first base. The unwritten rule of baseball was that on the field the other team was literally a mortal foe, and its players were to be treated as such. In the 1960s a player who did what Tolle did would be excoriated, fined, exiled to the manager’s “dog house” and probably demoted to the minors.
Last night the Red Sox players seemed to get a kick out of their exuberant rookie’s latest surprise—he also likes playing tricks on team mates—saying, “That’s Tolle!” as the agreed-upon answer when questioned by reporters after the game. The sports media was all positive, with ESPN calling The Hug “The most wholesome play of the season.”
Ethics Quiz: The “Racist” Halloween Costume
Is it stupid woke Halloween controversy season already? Sadly, it is.
Target removed a Halloween clown costume from its website and presumably its stores after social media mobs claimed that it was racist, evoking blackface and minstrel shows. As we know, companies are infamous weenies any time the race card is played against them, and virtually always grovel an apology. Thus Target sobbed on social media this week,
“An apology from us: We removed an offensive Halloween costume that should never have been part of our assortment. It is no longer for sale. As a company, we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. We know this is especially hurtful for our Black guests, team members and partners. Removing the costume is an important first step, and we are looking closely at how this happened and what needs to change to ensure this won’t happen again.”
I am strongly inclined to view this as another “Gotcha!” exercise from the race-obsessed. Talk about a case of “If you hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog” ! Let’s see: what aspect of the costume evokes blackface or minstrelsy? Did blackface performer swear orange costumes like that? Noooo. Did they wear black gloves on their hands? No! Did they wear little clown hats? Ruffles around their necks like Bozo? Also no. So what exactly creates the “minstrel show” vibe?It’s the fact that Target hired a black kid to model the costume! Put a white child in that thing and it looks like what it is: a clown costume.
Let me get this straight: Admirably, Target doesn’t see racist images at every turn, and hired a black model, when it should have hired a white model because the black kid made race-obsessed victim-mongers think of blackface. That wasn’t blackface, that was a child’s black face!
Is it the smile that’s the problem? You know, evoking this…
…? Again, it’s the actual black face wearing that smile that triggered the easily race-triggered. As for the smile , which the race-hustler think deliberately evokes “Mr. Bones” above, it is a creepy, killer clown smile, as worn by the murderous clown in Season 4 of “American Horror Story”…
Does that character evoke blackface and minstrel shows?
We are never going to get out from under the iron boot of race hustlers until companies and celebrities stop capitulating to race-baiting like this. On the other side of this ugly coin, what realistic, sound business options did Target have? Well, it could have asked whether its critics want the company to discriminate against black models. It could have educated the public and its customers about what is and isn’t blackface and minstrel imagery. It could have put a warning in the constume’s package, “Do not buy if your kid is black. The Woke and wonderful will think he’s in blackface.”
Or is this another example of the ditty, “He was right, dead right, as he sped along, but he’s just as dead as if he were wrong”? If standing on principle loses a company sales and public support, is it ethical?
Your Ethics Alarms Early Halloween Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Was Target right to apologize and pull the offending costume?
Trump Derangement Update, 7/30/26
One of my oldest (in both senses of the word) friends is a history professor at a major university here in the D.C. area. The things he posts on Facebook are head-exploding: like the mutation of his former rational self that EA expatriate Curmie has morphed into under the gamma rays of Trump Derangement, my scholarly friend frequently makes arguments I would expect from Ben Stiller’s character in “Tropic Thunder.”
Today he posted several defenses of Anthony Fauci, who is literally indefensible, comparing Rand Paul’s correct, factual and fair evisceration of the villain to a Soviet show-trial. Before that, the Professor posted with approval the following attack on the late Lindsay Graham by professional snot Andy Borowitz. I knew Andy in college. He was a standard issue Harvard Lampoon guy, overly convinced of his own wit and a sucker for a cheap shot. Whatever formula he developed over the years obviously works: he’s created and written successful sit-coms, has been a successful stand-up comic, and his satirical columns have been syndicated all over. That his major employers have been The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and The New Yorker should tell you all you need to know about Andy’s biases, and partially explains this effort which my Trump Deranged friend found so trenchant.
I think I’ll footnote it to make my commentary more accessible…
Ethics Quiz: The Professional Bimbo’s Late Hit
Courtney Stodden, a reality show star for about 15 years and with her career sagging, decided this week to accuse “Seinfeld” star Jason Alexander of abusive and exploitive behavior towards a “child” based on a sketch they performed together in 2012. The two were in a Funny or Die sketch where Alexander played a self-help guru and relationship coach. Stodden wore an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny small-as-it-could-be bikini as Alexander cracked jokes about her feminine assets.
At one point in the web video episode, Alexander rubbed an iPhone over her chest. “I was 17 years old in this photo,” Stodden wrote on Instagram. “The older I get, the more impossible this is to understand. During this comedy sketch, Jason Alexander repeatedly rubbed his phone across my breasts while saying there was ‘no signal’ in my head but ‘plenty of signal’ in my chest.” Jason was 53 at the time and co- writer of the sketch.
“Later in the sketch,” Stodden continued, “he joked that when I turned 18 he’d like to take me behind the couch and ‘have his way’ with me. IMDb credits him as one of the writers of the episode. As an adult, that fact has become harder—not easier—for me to understand. I was a minor. I didn’t have the legal power to decide whether I wanted to participate. The contracts were signed by adults. The paycheck went to Doug [her husband]. The production moved forward. I was the only child in the room. I felt so alone. Looking back now, I don’t see comedy. I see a 17-year-old girl whose body became part of an adult joke. People still say, ‘You chose to be there.’ Legally, I couldn’t make those decisions for myself. That’s the point. I can’t change what happened to me but I can ask myself: How did so many adults look at a minor and decide this was acceptable? That’s exactly why I speak out today. Children deserve laws that protect them. They shouldn’t have to become adults before realizing the law should have protected them all along.”
Alexander, not wishing to be cancelled over an offense from 14-year-old skit that nobody remembers, groveled an apology. “Looking back at the comedy sketch in which Ms. Stodden and I participated in 2012, I completely agree that it was inappropriate and I truly regret it,” he said. “But more importantly, I am deeply sorry for any harm or distress it has caused Ms. Stodden. I offer her my sincerest apologies.”
And now, as Paul Harvey would say, “The rest of the story!”
As an introduction, here is Courtney at what I guess she would call “her peak”:
Is This Movie Marquee Clever, Unethical or Just Stupid? It’s Unethical, and Here’s Why…
I guess this is Ambiguous Bigotry Sunday.
Following a theme that began with this morning’s ethics quiz, we now have the viral controversy over the obnoxious Lake Aswego (Oregon) Theater and Cafe marquee for “The Odyssey.”
On social media (and elsewhere), the theater’s owners are being accused of “disgustingly blatant antisemitism” as Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute put it on “X.” I’m sorry I haven’t kept up on Lake Oswego movie theater marketing trends: apparently this one makes a habit of cheeky, politically provocative or otherwise controversial marquee messages. In February, for example, the theater’s message promoting “Melania,” the Amazon MGM documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, read, “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday.” Amazon pulled the movie from the theater, and the proprietors reacted with a “Who, us?” shrug.
That example is not irrelevant: Lake Oswego is heavily Democratic, reliably voting for Democratic candidates for all federal and state offices. The last time a Republican was favored by voters was in 2016, when it narrowly favored Republican Secretary of State candidate Dennis Richardson while the city and the state went into Hillary Clinton’s column in the Presidential race. Lake Oswego is in Oregon, one of the most fanatically progressive, Democratic and woke states in the union. 80% of Democrats, the Pew Research Center says, hold “an unfavorable view of Israel” as of June 2026, an 11-point increase from 2025.
How likely is it that the marquee in a place like Lake Oswego, was deliberately praising “the Jews” (You know, as in “the Jews made a heroic odyssey”to Canaan”) as opposed to cheekily denigrating them? Not bloody likely at all. Is the message an innocent comparison of the endless warring between Israel and Palestinians to the Trojan War? If so, then why only mention “the Jews”?
The online debate has seen a suspicious effort to deflect the real issue by arguing over whether “the Odyssey” was really before “the Jews.” Does the theater mean the actual voyage (there probably wasn’t one), or Homer’s poetic description of it? That’s not the real issue, and the debate over it is pedantic sophistry. The issue is whether the marquee is anti-Semitic, designed to appeal to anti-Semites (you know, progressives and Democrats), and cleverly composed to do so while giving the theater and fans of the smear plausible deniability.
The answers are yes, yes, and yes.
How Bonkers Is Woke America’s Obsession With Normalizing The Transgender Fad? This Bonkers:
How far gone does a fanatic have to be to have an event like this and not expect most people to conclude that the organizers are out of their minds? Menstrual equity? Free period underwear?
The event is scheduled for June 17 and supported by Boston Mayor Wu’s “Office of LGBTQ Advancement.” I am solely tempted to do a riff on this, but I’m going to resist. Mayor Wu, who is about as wokey as a human being can get, is really getting away with this somehow. Wow. Talk about pandering to a minority! This may be an all time record.
