The Daily Babble

Hu's on First?

No, this isn't going to be a diatribe about how the Bushites and their corporate cronies are so eager to sell out to China, providing them with all the military technology, manufacturing jobs and debts they need to bury us, Khrushchev style. Although I could write that.

It's about humor. Did you get the joke in the headline? What do you have to know to know it's humor (whether you think it's funny or not is another matter)? You have to know something about today's news, that the Emperor Hu from China is in the U.S. meeting with Smirk. Okay, so he's not the emperor, officially. (Probably you have to know something about the old Flash Gordon serials to know why calling him the Emperor Hu is possibly a little funny, but that's another joke.) And you have to know the Abbott and Costello routine. If you don't know the one I mean, why should I even tell you?

What percentage of America do you think would get this joke? That's what I thought, too. Pretty depressing, isn't it?

This line of thinking came to me as I perused the back page of the Wednesday San Francisco Chronicle. It had the Asmussen panel I've stolen for the occasion. To find it funny you have to know at least the headlines about "missing links" recently discovered, or maybe there was just one missing link (and lots of headlines): the fish with legs, sort of. And you'd have to know about John McCain's recent forays into Pat Robersonland looking to be the Bushite candidate for 2008, a strange but somewhat delightful strategy, since it seems self-destructive, and there's nothing like self-destructive Republicans who aren't destroying other countries and many other people in the process, to brighten up the day.

But that wasn't what got me started. It was one panel cartoon on the same page, a Bizarro by Piraro. I will try to steal that one, too but I'm not sure I can. So I'll describe it---specifically my experience of it. I saw a cartoon of a police officer cuffing a young man, saying (via the balloon above his head) "Anything you say can & will be used against you in a future life..." The legend at the bottom of the picture says, KARMA MIRANDA ACT.

Not only did I get it and laughed, but I really admired its elegance. And when you find something funny and really admire its elegance you want to immediately tell somebody about it, share it. And then the thought came to me: like, with who? Who can I be absolutely sure will understand this? And the answer was...almost nobody.

I knew some people who would get the Karma part. And some people who would know what the Miranda Act warning is (if only from a billion TV cop shows.) And some people might know who Carmen Miranda was, especially if they noticed the fruit on top of the cop's head, which I didn't catch until I looked at the cartoon again. But the joke doesn't work unless you get all of the references. And I can't quite be positive. That anyone would.

I'm tired of explaining references all the time, even though I don't do it all the time, because I try not to make them, so I don't have to explain them. It's partly an age thing, of course. Carmen Miranda did not discover radium or was she even under-secretary of state. The same kind of people who know who all the Simpsons are would know who Carmen Miranda is, if it happened to be the 1940s or 50s. I first learned of her from cartoon parodies made in the early 50s or earlier, that ran very early Saturday mornings on TV when I was in grade school. Later I probably saw her on variety shows, though my only clear memory of her is in a movie with Groucho Marx. But for someone in my generation, you just knew who Carmen Miranda was. An odd looking Latin dancer who wore hats with piles of fruit on them.

But you have to know at least the name Carmen Miranda to get the pun. Karma, Carmen, get it? I really didn't want to have to explain that. So is this what old age is going to be, especially in an era of galloping ignorance...me chuckling to myself, and being ashamed of getting an elegant joke?

You can really cheer me up by commenting in outrage about how you feel personally insulted because I didn't know you would get this joke immediately.