Word pairings of the week: “turd-bespaffed”, “liberal fascist” and “Pat Paulsen”.
In the course of my daily surfing I usually hit a number of news sites and blogs and then follow the links that look interesting; this week a couple of those links led me to a couple of pieces of satire that I knew would elicit strong reactions. But that's to be expected when a former candidate for President tells old ethnic jokes on a talk show while made up in blackface or an award-winning journalist advocates banning or killing all dogs. These things just go right over some people's heads.

One day a long, long, long time ago, Merv Griffin's talk show came back from a commercial to Merv and actor Doug McClure, who may or may not have been a little drunk at the time. Merv introduced his next guest, comedian and (then) two-time presidential candidate Pat Paulsen. It would seem from the video evidence that neither of them was expecting what happened next: Paulsen came out on stage wearing white gloves, tux and tails, and made up in blackface - Al Jolson style – and announced, “Tonight I'd like to talk about ethnic humour.” Then, deadpan, he told some ancient and not-very-funny Polish jokes, Italian jokes and jokes about Jews before finishing with a 'knock-knock' joke. When that got a laugh he said it proved that American jokes were funnier than ethnic jokes and danced offstage to the tune of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” According to Paul Di Filippo at the Weird Universe blog, the segment never aired. One supposes that Merv's producers knew trouble when they saw it. But it seems to me that Paulsen was making the point that the stereotypes in the jokes he told were as offensive to Poles, Italians and Jews as the blackface was to African Americans.

On Valentine's Day, British Press Award winner (“Food And Drink Writer of the Year” in 2005) Giles Coren's column appeared in The Times Online bearing the title “Enough whining. Ban all stinking dogs. Now”.

Coren writes about a boy who was killed by family pets a week earlier and argues that while “the boneheaded popular press can use a toddler's death to hammer such traditional bogeymen as paedophiles, social workers, “evil” young boys and invisible foreign ne'er-do-wells... they have nothing to say” when it's a child mauled by the family dog. The solution, he says, is that “Dogs have just got to go. All dogs. Just to be safe.”

That whoosh you just heard was the sound of the bit going right over blogger Cary Wesberry's head. “Only a liberal fascist could come up with this nonsense,” writes Wesberry at the Pat Gray blog, just before he (or possibly she) names Coren the winner of “Most Idiotic Column of the Week Award.” Such an honour is only possible if the selection committee takes at face value such Coren statements as “Kill all the dogs. Kill all of them. I'll do it if you can't face it, and toss the rigid corpses on the fatty flames with a pitchfork” or believes Coren's claim that he's moving “purely and simply because my beautiful, leafy Camden street is the most turd-bespaffed thoroughfare in England.”

One hopes that Wesberry isn't himself (or herself) the owner of a controversial breed. Coren applauded Israel's ban on Staffordshire Terriers, saying, “you know that one false snarl and a helicopter gunship's going to whoop into view, flatten your house, your nan's house and your local school, and then blame it on the dog.”

Or the liberal fascists.