Not-Quite-Ready-for-Primetime player

My nine-month old daughter is starting to develop her own sense of humor.
I discovered this a few weeks ago, when, as I was changer her diaper on the changing table, I took the pacifier from her mouth and put it in mine. She was confused for a moment, and then broke into a broad smile and giggled. She thought it was funny – why is Daddy doing something the baby does? – and then she reached up and grabbed it back from me.
It’s strange to think about, but we were all born without a sense of humor. Not that we didn’t develop one in time, of course, but at the moment we came into the world, we probably had what most babies have: a strong cry, minimal reflexes and, in my case, a permanently confused look on my face. None of us came out of the womb knowing anything, let alone what’s funny and what is not. We learn it in time. I’m only realizing this now, as I am seeking a human being develop herself from a little speck in the ultrasound pictures into a beautiful little person.
It makes me consider how my own sense of humor was developed. My first memory of something being truly funny came when I was around 5 years old. The family had just purchased its first VCR, and one of the tapes we had was “Saturday Night Live: The Best of John Belushi,” which we watched many times. I found his extreme physicality and intensity to be hilarious, finding out only years later that it was this same excess that ultimately led to his death from an overdose in 1982.
After this introduction, I was an “SNL” fan, and would watch the old episodes on cable TV with my Dad. As I grew, I became interested in the early 90s cast, with Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Chris Farley, and Phil Hartman. I watched it, found some of it funny, but always knew in the back of my mind that it didn’t hold a candle to the work of the “Not Ready for Prime Time” players of the show’s early years. In time, Hartman would be murdered, Farley, in an eerie echo of John Belushi, would die of an overdose, and I would walk away from watching SNL for nearly 15 years.
In the late summer and fall of 2008, as my daughter grew closer to being born, my interest in SNL returned with its coverage of the 2008 election, and Tina Fey’s dead-on impersonation of Sarah Palin, which once again showed how powerful a comedic medium this venerable enterprise could be when it measured the pulse of the society it mirrored. I think this one character portrayal did more damage to Sarah Palin’s credibility than all of the gaffes and painfully awkward interviews. After the election, my interest in the show again faded, except for the occasional sketches I would hear about around the coffee maker Monday morning.
Still, I know that when my own daughter is old enough, I will hook up the VCR, dust off the beat-up cover of the Belushi video, and ask, with a twinkle in my eye, “Hey, do you want to watch something funny?”

Shoe on the other foot

It’s hard to fit the shoe on the other foot.
It has been very interesting to watch the Internet reaction to mysterious posters of Barack Obama allegedly being posted in some parts of the United States. The poster, for those who haven’t heard, depicts the president in “Joker” make-up from the most recent “Batman” movie over a single word: “Socialism.”
According to an KTLA.com article on posters found in the Los Angeles area, Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction “politically mean spirited and dangerous.”
What is interesting about this scenario is that the magazine Vanity Fair portrayed George W. Bush in the same make-up in 2008, and no one said a word. In fact, I remember far worse being said, some of it by yours-truly, about the 43rd president. I even went so far as to install his head on pictures of Adolf Hitler using Photoshop while pretending to pay attention in my college media classes.
For eight years, it was really easy to point fingers and scream about how bad the president was, how opportunistic and insincere he seemed, and how it seemed that he wanted to lead us down a path to our own destruction. When I cast my ballots Nov. 4, I think I did so in the hopes that it would change something - to present an alternative to the ham-fisted antics of George W. Bush. It was, in retrospect, the high water mark for eight years of bumper stickers reading, “Dissent is patriotic;” eight years of telling the other side how bad their president was doing; eight years of smugly telling ourselves that we could do it better.
Well, it’s our side (if there is such a thing) in the White House now – and it’s been somewhat of an eye-opener to me. One of the nice things about being in the opposition is that you can cast stones but don’t have to deal with the bruises. Is dissent still patriotic when someone you like is in the White House? Now, I find myself trying to explain why Obama did this or that to people who didn’t vote for him. It gives me a sense of what it must have been like for the embattled conservatives who tried to join the student newspaper at St. Cloud State - defending decisions you didn't make, and may not have agreed with, on the principal that the party you supported made them.
Here is the most ironic comparison of all: in a way, I've become what I once despised. On a bright fall day in 2004, when W. flew into St. Cloud for a rally, I was among hundreds of counter-protesters who showed up bright and early to express their displeasure with the 43rd presidents. The event went smoothly, until the conservative spectators who showed up to cheer W. on to another White House victory started to leave the baseball stadium that hosted the event, and crossed paths with the counter-protesters. It was as if you'd mixed baking soda and vinegar: it didn't explode, but it sure simmered. One of the most often-hear remarks I remember that day, thrown at us as an epithet from anonymous W. supporters, was the phrase, "Get a job." It stung. We were there because we cared deeply about the future of our country. Or thought we did, anyway.
Now, as I hear about people protesting health care reform, or demanding that Obama produce a birth certificate that proves he wasn't born in Kenya, I find myself saying the same thing: "Get a job."
It's certainly easier to blame than to try, isn't it?