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Right-wing humor
BY ADAM REILLY
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TUESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2004, NEW YORK -- Living in Massachusetts, you can start to think the apex of Republican-oriented humor is Howie Carr calling John Kerry "Liveshot." But the truth is, there’s a rich, fertile world of GOP comedy out there. On Monday night, at the Laugh Factory on West 42nd Street, some of the nation’s sharpest Republican comics plied their craft as part of the "Right Stuff: Comedy for Real Americans" tour. Jeff "Big Daddy" Wayne, a sweaty, Hawaiian shirt-wearing Kentuckian with a fondness for White Trash jokes, kicked things off with nuggets like these: On France: "I’m White Trash, or, as the French say, ‘Pale Debris’… ‘You cannot use our air space’? [sic] I would have bombed France, that’s what I would have done. Take that plaque off the Statue of Liberty--‘Give me your tired, give me your poor.’ We’ve got enough poor people in this country. We need some rich happy people!" On Teresa Heinz Kerry: "Her speech at the Democratic Convention was like a bottle of Heinz Ketchup. Slow, full of vinegar, and when she was finished, you wanted to smack her bottom." On discovering a Playboy in his son’s room: "Our reaction as parents today? ‘Thank God. Thank God.’ Yeah, we got him a subscription—‘Let’s reinforce that a bit.’ I’m not anti-gay. I am flame retardant, and I think that’s my right." On Arnold Schwarzenegger: "I’d like to see him beat the shit out of Michael Moore. I’d like to see him beat the living shit out of Michael Moore!" Tough act to follow, but Julia Gorin, a whiney young woman who wore a locket with pictures of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice, rose to the occasion. Much of her act was devoted to defending the president, whom she calls "Georgie," from his detractors, e.g.: "People need to stop making fun of my Georgie’s intellect. I don’t know why everybody in this country thinks they’re smarter than that man… What’s the usual criticism? They say things like [cue snooty British accent], ‘He’s not intellectually curious. He’s not introspective.’ This is not true. Men like George Bush and Ronald Reagan, they’ve looked inside, and they’ve found the enemy on the outside.’" Goren also panned celebrity activism, lampooned world travel, and pegged Hillary Clinton as a once and future murderer. Had Clinton deigned to be Kerry’s running mate, Goren said, ‘She wouldn’t have let him live to see the first hundred days. She wasn’t going to wait no eight years to become president! He would have gone the same way as Ron Brown, Vincent Foster, and Buddy the Dog." The highlight, though, was Chris Warren, a stocky, mustachioed, pot-bellied comedy club owner from Spokane. Warmed by Warren’s tales of entertaining US troops in Iraq -- he recently visited the country with the "Comics on Duty World Tour" -- the 30-person crowd was ready to be challenged by his edgy material. And edgy it was. "Okay, Saddam Hussein had $22 million on his head. I shot four guys that looked just like him. The problem was, it was in a 7-11 in Minneapolis. I got in a little trouble for that." Pushing the envelope even further, Warren poked fun at the 72 virgins allegedly awaiting Islamic martyrs in the afterlife: "72 virgins…The last thing I want is, ‘Oh, gross! I’m not putting that in my mouth.’ That’s not paradise; that was high school! Tell you what -- you want to give me a reward, give me four bleach-blond trailer park bitches that can suck start my motorcycle. That’s a reward." Call him a Bob Hope for the War on Terror.
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