KAM's Blog

I guess political comedy is separated from fake news because of the format. Many of the messages are the same, though. Comedians poke fun at and draw out some of the lunacy that the 'real news' spews out daily. Two funny guys are:

If you are not familiar with the work of Dennis Miller and Eddie Izzard, you should check them out. You can go high tech with Youtube, or low tech with these links:
Miller quotations and Izzard quotations.

"Smart" humor requires knowledge to appreciate. Physical and degrading humor will always be around, but it doesn't take much to 'get' it. I'd argue that shallow humor breeds shallow laughs. (Sure we giggle when someone has something unexpected happen to them.) Deeper humor, the really good stuff, can actually set you rolling.

Before television we had political cartoons in the newspaper. Did they mislead and under inform the public? No. Why's that? People didn't use them as their only source of news content. People understood their purpose, and they drew attention to issues that were important at the time. Use of political cartoons in the classroom can give the same benefits as scrutinizing fake news. It's lower-tech as well. Did you know Dr. Seuss was a political cartoonist before he started writing children's books? (He also did a lot of advertising work too.) A look into his biography yields a lot of interesting facts. I've been working on this book in between everything else. It's a big one, but it is very interesting.

PS...Obama is on Leno tonight. I know Leno is a comedian like the gentlemen above, but it does speak volumes about pop culture's role in our lives today!