I wanted to find a clip of Sarah Palin making a joke, in order to further explore my deep and profound insight about the connection between conservatives and humor, or lack thereof. But 5 seconds into the first clip, I thought, "So that's what a Pomeranian put through a wood-chipper sounds like" and abandoned the project.
So I typed "Sarah Palin 'community organizer'" into Godggle and put up the most recent clip that came up. No idea if it's actually applicable, but feel free to watch it and let me know. "Community organizer" is a phrase Palin frequently uses as a laugh line, and her audiences do, actually, laugh at it. While teh nutz may find the idea of community organizing hilarious, it is not actually humorous. There is a difference between the way we laugh when someone falls down (cf. "America's Funniest Home Videos") and the laughter that comes out of a kind of "Oh, shit" moment when a boundary is crossed. Humor reveals those hidden social conventions, arbitrary beliefs, truisms and cliches that pass for 'common sense.' Really good humor makes skeptics out of the audience; it should shift them from in the group mind to out of the group mind. This is antithetical to the conservative project, which is to make conventionality comfortable and invisible.
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