CARLTON FLETCHER: Righteous indignation as comedy

Oooh, I need a dirty woman.

— Pink Floyd

I’ve had fun the last few days reading the literary equivalent of wailing and gnashing of teeth by pundits who were “outraged” at the alleged comedy of alleged comedian Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

While I admittedly could care less about this supposedly high-brow affair — although how anyone could associate “high-brow” with “politicians” today is beyond my grasp — I have been amazed at the response of apologists like Michael Reagan, Cal Thomas, Steve and Cokie Roberts, Eugene Robinson and the like, whose idea of editorial discourse is to spin every event that ever happens on the face of the planet earth to fit into their very narrow worldviews.

I think what makes it so funny to me is reading and hearing the righteous indignation and disgust directed at Wolf, whose 15 minutes of fame would have been exactly that long had these pundits not felt the urge to remind everyone why she is little more than a vulgarian (conservatively speaking) or a champion of women’s rights (liberally speaking).

What Wolf is, all politics aside, is a performer of obviously very limited talent who somehow lucked into a high-profile gig with an opportunity to enhance her career but blew it with a set that was so unfunny, it should be comedians who are offended more than the politicians and their mouthpieces.

Maybe the funniest thing I read/heard about this comedic nightmare — other than the fact that the president chose to throw himself a pep rally a few hundred miles away among his blind followers rather than face what he knew would be the tongue-lashing he received in absentia — was the writing of those among the punditry who were aghast that vulgarity had become so commonplace in a country whose manners were once impeccable, or at least they were where the writer become the right-thinking man he is today.

Let’s see … this guy is offended by the vulgarity used to poke fun at a man who has been: a) accused of hooking up with and paying off a porn star during his wife’s pregnancy; b) used perhaps the crudest among George Carlin’s “seven words you can’t say on TV” (which should be, in the era of Trump, changed to things you used to couldn’t say on TV) to brag about grabbing women; c) reportedly involved himself in unprintable shenanigans in a hotel room with Russian hookers, and d) used the most public forum in the history of the world to make fun of handicapped people, talk about the physical attributes of specific women and women in general, and, perhaps most grotesque of all, demean soldiers who had given their lives for this country.

It doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest Trump supporter in the great big white world, there are few people in the public eye more vulgar than he is.

Wolf also drew the ire of the shocked punditry because she had the audacity to insinuate that those two bastions of purity, Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders, lie. What!!?? You’d accuse PR hacks whose job is to sell and/or spin the words of a man whose stance on issues changes from tweet to tweet of lying? How dare you!

(Sorry, folks, but the first line on either of these ladies’ resumes is most likely “Willing to tell any lie, no matter how outrageous, to sell the boss man’s point of view.”)

So a hack of a comedian told some tasteless jokes at a gathering of politicians, people who have collectively taken vulgarity to levels that Richard Prior, Lenny Bruce, Dane Cook and Dave Chappelle combined couldn’t touch, much less a never-was — and never-will-be — like Wolf. I’m not saying we should ignore the poor taste of her performance. I’m just saying we should lighten up on the righteous indignation. After all, vulgarity is a domain dominated by the people who are so insulted.

Contact Carlton Fletcher at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.