Cyber-Comedy

I'm not writing exclusively about the Foley situation these days, but it is a Category 5 comedic topic. That's where you'll get a completely unrelated wacky news story and the punchline will still involve Foley. Any slight mention is like a guarantee the audience will react. In fact you can't go too long without referring to it or you'll just seem out of it.

Since everybody out there in comedy land is writing about the topic, it's sometimes wise to do a zig-zag approach. Despite comments from Butch who believes I exist in an anti-Bush rage, I am not above making fun of the Democrats at a time like this. Why? There is a much better chance of selling a joke on them right now. The Republicans are in such a mess that just reading the news sounds like an anti-GOP rant. Last night I sold a joke pointing out that this situation had led to some bipartisan cooperation. The GOP leaders had gone to Ted Kennedy to find out the best place to put Foley in rehab.

This may dismay the progressives who read this blog but they have the superior intellectual skills to deal with it. Remember, being a comedic-freelancing whore can trump my anti-Bush leanings anytime. I'm running a business here; not a campaign rally.

So what is new about this crisis? It's perhaps the first one I remember that's the exclusive province of the Internet. Yes, I watched a little of Dennis Hastert on TV, and by the way, there's more bad news for him: DNA tests have proven he's the father of the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

But mainly we have a story here that I read about online, involving someone's emails. I got most of the news about them from various websites, and responded on my blog, and with my own email of jokes to L.A. I admit that I first knew the jokes were used by seeing them on television, but I could have dug around on the Internet and found them somewhere else. For the most part though, this had been a self-contained Internet-generated experience based on a Congressman's emails. Okay, plus his text messages. That is a first. It is not earth-shattering but most change is subtle. Thinking back, this was almost completely, from premise to result, a new phenomenon: Cyber-comedy.

P.S. I will continue on this story as long as it sells. If farmers milked a cow as hard as we are going to milk this, they would be arrested. I do hope we get back to the other big issues of the day soon. Monday, 8 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq. It could be melting down as we speak. The soldier from Oregon who just died, mentioned in his last email how tired he was - there's those emails again, entering our lives. We've got to get back on this war. I do have rage about that, and besides, it's just not fair to focus on other things while these young Americans are in such peril. I thought David Letterman had the best joke recently about the situation: "Bob Woodward claims that the Bush administration is in a state of denial. Today the Bush administration denied it." That is what we are striving for in the comedy-writing business. Elegant jokes that say something.