HUMOUR STILL MISSING

Writing in the LA Times Bill Maher asks "when can we finally be funny again?" Rather than confront the fact that he's no Johnny Carson (who never lectured his audience) Maher blames timing rather than self-assumed lefty moral superiority for his failure to draw laughs:

WHENEVER THERE'S a tragedy, comedians are presented with a dilemma: When is the right time to make jokes about it, and what kind of jokes can you make? I vividly remember watching Johnny Carson every year on Lincoln's birthday, doing assassination jokes. (My favorite was about Lincoln's birthday stripper, "Freda Slaves." According to Johnny, "Every guy took a shot at her in the balcony; four scored and seven came close.") When the jokes bombed, he'd comment to Ed McMahon: "Too soon."

I know something about "too soon," because it was only six days after 9/11 when I got into all sorts of trouble with the country and the White House for saying that sticking with a suicide mission, as the terrorists had done, was not, strictly speaking, "cowardly," and that, in fact, "we have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away." Of course, by "we," I meant American society as a whole, but it was not hard for people who never liked me to begin with to pretend that I was calling the military cowardly. I wasn't.

Maher should try that line again and see how it's received. You see, Bill, you have to be funny in the first place before you can be funny again.