Did You Hear the One About the Pundit Who Thought Lesbians Are Funny?
Political commentator Monica Crowley is enduring some social media criticism Thursday for a decidedly uncreative joke she made about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law Student who withstood Rush Limbaugh's similarly unpleasant attacks earlier this year.
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Crowley, who's on The McLaughlin Group and contributes to Fox News, tweeted out the headline "Sandra Fluke Announces Engagement" and added her punchline: "to a man?" The joke, of course, being that perhaps Sandra Fluke—being an outspoken advocate for women's rights—might be a lesbian. (She's not, but a lot of the Congressional testimony she gave about birth control centered on some of her friends who are.) Several folks in our Twitter feed quickly noted that a joke with the simple implied punchline of "Lesbians, gosh aren't they funny?" isn't actually all that funny, and in fact, playing up an offensive and long-standing way to tear down liberal feminists. Crowley tweeted that she was "'Insinuating' nothing. Straightforward question. No answer yet." (The answer is yes, she's engaged to a man.) Then Crowley quickly followed up with this:
I love exposing the Left's total lack of a sense of humor.
— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) April 26, 2012
But that's not quite fair. A lot of the "Left' has in fact expressed their displeasure with the joke using their own brand of humor. Like this one:
Why'd the chicken cross the road? Lesbians! #CrowleyJokes bit.ly/JJ2GKi
— Jeremy Holden (@JerAHolden) April 26, 2012
A pretty creative way of pointing out what he finds offensive about this joke (and why the punchline doesn't quite land.) You can search the #CrowleyJokes hashtag yourself for more variations on this theme. (Update: Though it was quickly ovetaken by ad-promoting spam bots.) This seems to us like the best way for those who find the joke offensive to point it out, lest they appear disproportionately outraged about a tweet from a lesser-known pundit. Indeed some people's attacks on Crowley don't reflect very well on them, and she's retweeted many of those to point out that ... some people on the Left are just as rude as she is? We're not sure. Anyway, Best to fight bad attempts at humor with better attempts at it.
