Humor and Satire

Obnoxious and Unethical Post-Election Reaction #1: Comedian Jim Gaffigan

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Shut up and be funny, Jim.

Jim Gaffigan can be a funny stand-up comic, but whoever it was at CBS who invited him to write a political op-ed piece should be fired. Here it is, with a few comments from me…

“How are you holding up? Are you over it? I’m over it. I’m fine. At least, at times I think that. It’s obviously not what I wanted but that’s life. I’m not going to lie. It been an adjustment, but the world continues to spin.”

It’s an election, you fool. Just because you hang out with people who are Trump Deranged and think anything short of woke insanity, mandatory political correctness and free “gender-affirming care” for illegal immigrants in prison is fascism doesn’t mean this or any election is something you have to “hold up” after. This kind of talk spreads panic, paranoia, division and craziness. Shut up.

“And I’m an adult. I have children that are counting on me. I mean, they don’t listen to me, but I can’t just curl up in a ball and mope.”

Then you’re not an adult.

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On Art, Conspicuous Consumption, Bananas and More

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I missed this pre-Great Stupid story in 2019, when it was a harbinger of stupid things to come, and so missed it again this year, when it was back in the news a few days ago. It wasn’t too long ago that Fred and Pennagain reliably alerted me to ethics stories around the web that I otherwise might have missed. A few of you do send me story ideas regularly, but something like this shouldn’t slip through the cracks.

“This” is this (Source of that movie quote?): Absurdist artist Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall at an art show in 2019 and called it “Comedian. He claimed that it was intended to force critics to consider how modern “art” is defined, but it just as easily have been a publicity stunt or a con. My wige considered Jackson Pollock paintings no more “art” than bananas taped to a wall. Performance artist David Datuna ripped the banana off the wall and ate it, so Cattalan just taped another banana to another wall. The New York Post recreated “Comedian” for just $5.75, but, see, because the Post isn’t an “artist,” that didn’t count.

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A Non-Ethics Note For An Absurd Day

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Since yesterday’s trivia quiz was so well received, I’m also going to begin today with more non-ethics light-heartedness, sort of. [The answer to that trivia question is Carl Switzer, better known by his “Our Gang” character’s name, “Alfalfa.” It was a trick question in that I deliberately asked about what actor “appeared” in two of the Ethics Alarms Christmas classics that have a viewers guide published annually here (the third is “Miracle on 34th Street). Switzer, his career as an adult actor sinking fast, is the high school student who makes George Bailey and Mary fall into a gym swimming pool while they are doing the Charleston in “IAWL” It’s also his face in the photo (above) of the Haines Sister’s brother, “the Dog-Faced Boy” who served with Bing and Danny in the army. Switzer wasn’t credited for that “appearance.” A couple of commenters alluded to the answer by saying that they were sure “our gang” at Ethics Alarms could come up with the answer, and that there was “a grain of truth in that.” Grain, alfalafa…get it?

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Unethical Cartoon of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is one of the times I miss our once-frequent cartoonist commenters, the apparently retired King Kool and the now completely Trump Deranged Ampersand. What a snotty, insulting, arrogant and stupid cartoon that is. I’m not sure where it cane from: my guess would be The New Yorker.

Just because the unethical assertion that voting for Donald Trump (or against the spectacularly awful Kamala Harris, the totalitarianism, censorship and anti-Semitism-supporting party she represented or the incompetent Biden administration) means you are deplorable, “garbage,” a racist, a sexist or a fascist comes in a cartoon doesn’t mitigate the vile nature of the statement. I’m sure the cartoon will be defended by the claim that it is mocking people like the speaker in the drawing.

Sure.

America’s Pop Culture May Save Us Yet: The “Trump Dance”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This is the most wonderfully strange country, isn’t it? I have mentioned here before how the United States “won” the World’s Fair called “Expo 67.” A huge, imposing Soviet Union pavilion displayed threshers, tractors and other farm equipment, tanks and satellites, perfectly capturing the harsh gray gravity of life in the USSR. Not far away was the United States pavilion, housed in a giant transparent geodesic dome (courtesy of Buckminister Fuller), filled with joyful explosions of American pop culture: Raggedy Ann dolls, artifacts from the baseball Hall of Fame, cool cars, rock ‘n roll and classic movie clips running on loops. There was Gary Cooper alone in the dusty street; Cary Grant being shot at by that crop duster; Julie Andrews spinning on the mountain top at the start of “The Sound of Music,” Gene Kelly singing in the rain. Tough choice for the international visitors: which country would you want to live in?

And now, after one of the bitterest Presidential campaigns in our history, following almost a decade of a constantly widening breach in our politics, values and discourse, the essential light-heartedness (and habitual triviality) that has always been a feature of our national character is pulling us together.

I didn’t see this coming.

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Thanks, BlueSky!

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The self-proclaimed progressive onclave social media platform designed to isolate the Good people from unclean thoughts and their Nazi neighbors is proving to be a magnificent social experiment testing the proposition that the Mutated Left of the 21st Century can’t tolerate dissent or any ideas that don’t make them feel warm and cuddly.

As first noted here by commenter Michael R., “Apparently, all the liberals who left X went to BlueSky and immediately started reporting everyone else for not being ‘woke’ enough for their tastes. Their ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ reports have gone from 350,000 in all to 2023 to over 40,000/day since the election. Of course, some moderation requests probably can’t even get in because they are busy.” Yes, the experiment is working out just fine. These people, as they and their Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates demonstrated, don’t get that freedom of speech thingy. The funny part is that it was in great part the bubble progressives live in that led their party to its2024 disaster, and their solution is …..to construct a stronger bubble.

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Creative! Funny! But Unethical [Video Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A video submitted as part of an insurance claim in January appeared to show a brown bear tearing up the interior of a Rolls-Royce.Similar videos involving other cars were turned in to two additional insurers. All together, the three insurance companies collectively paid out over $140,000.

But an investigation called Operation Bear Claw revealed that the attacks were really insurance scams.“Upon further scrutiny of the video, the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume,” the department said in a news release. This bear suit…

Those things at the bottom were used to imitate bear claw marks.

The California Department of Insurance has arrested Ruben Tamrazian, 26; Ararat Chirkinian, 39; and Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, all of Glendale, Calif.; and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, of Los Angeles. They face charges of insurance fraud and conspiracy.

Ethics Dunce: The National Park Service

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yeah, about violating “norms”….

The National Mall is supposed to contain unifying and patriotic memorials and monuments and to be a place of pride for all Americans. It is certainly not a venue for partisan grandstanding and electioneering, or, at least wasn’t designed to be. Never mind, though: as part of the Biden Administration’s effort to try to snatch victory from the maw of the most utterly deserved defeats in American Presidential election history, the National Park Service provided a permit for an ugly, satirical, attack on Donald Trump and his supporters (they are garbage, after all) on the Mall, neatly timed to coincide with the last ditch “anything goes” assault on traditional election campaign civility and fairness because, well, “saving democracy” justifies anything.

The bronze sculpture features a pile of Dairy Queen-arranged shit on the desk of ex-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, complete with nameplate. The elegant plaque reads,

“This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election. President Trump celebrates these heroes of January 6th as ‘unbelievable patriots’ and ‘warriors.’ This monument stands as a testament to their daring sacrifice and lasting legacy.”

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The 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck Births the “Puerto Rico Is An Island of Garbage” Caboose

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

So it’s come to this.

The 2024 election is its own, massive ethics train wreck, as the tag will show you. It officially began with Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) spending too long lying to the public about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental state and deciding to select a Presidential nominee Soviet-style bypassing all democratic norms and processes. The party broke all previous campaign records for hypocrisy by taking this course while already making the dangerous claim that Republicans are the threats to democracy, and that Donald Trump as President would never allow another free election again. Amazingly, the campaign has gone downhill ethically since that point.

Just as tornadoes sometimes spin off little baby cyclones that still are deadly enough to kill people, the big Ethics Train Wrecks (or ETWs) as designated by Ethics Alarms, like the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck and the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck (which spawned the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck), often generate related ethics train wrecks that cause a lot of their own damage.

But I did not foresee that a Don Rickles-style “roast comic’s” jab at an ongoing news story would or could, even in the Age of the Great Stupid, turn into a controversy dominating headlines when the election is so near and serious matters should be the public’s focus.

I’ll summarize the events as efficiently as possible to get to the main point:

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Ethics Hero: Jon Stewart

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

There hasn’t been a Jon Stewart sighting at Ethics Alarms for a while, but he has a thick dossier here, mostly negative and deservedly so. He has also been an Ethics Hero twice before, but long, long ago before Stewart got full of himself and spawned the metastasizing of almost all cable and network news satire shows into progressive and Democratic propaganda tools.

Nonetheless, Stewart recently bucked his mostly Trump-Deranged audience by defending comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s sometimes racially and ethnically provocative stand-up routine at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally—you know, the one the ironically-named Axis of Unethical Conduct says was modeled on a 1938 Nazi rally.

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