"At Least There Were No Midgets In The Punchline..."

First, let’s get something straight.

Both Dave and Sarah were doing what they do.

Dave told a sophomoric joke to an audience that thinks Howard Stern is a valid measure of taste and decorum.

Sarah pandered with passion to the uber-conservative Republican base that sees her as the future of the party.

Second, as you might expect, I have a little trouble standing behind the Palins as they express their righteous indignation with a skill that would be the envy of any savvy public relations firm.

Because it occurs to me that if they were more concerned with offense than opportunity, they would take Dave up on his offer to go on the program and show him up for the multi millionaire case of arrested development that he’s always been.

As parents, do the Palins have a right to be offended by a joke inferring that their 14 year old daughter got knocked up?

Duh.

Like I said, though, Dave was doing what Dave does.

It doesn’t make it right.

It just makes it Dave.

Having said all that, here’s a plot twist you might not be expecting.

I’m totally disappointed in Dave.

And not because the joke was in bad taste.

Bad taste in our culture has long ago graduated from envelope pushing to status quo.

I’m not so much disappointed because the joke was in bad taste.

I’m disappointed because it was a bad joke.

Almost everybody knows that it was the older daughter, Bristol, who got knocked up.

But it was the 14 year old, Willow, who was at the ball game with her parents in New York.

And any reasonably talented comedy writer would have known that the joke was fatally flawed because it assumed that the audience would be willing, let alone able, to do a whole lot of editing in their head as the joke was told.

“Uh..let’s see, it was the younger girl who was there, but he’s really referring to the older daughter who was the one who got knocked up even though all he said was “daughter”, so we have to assume that he was talking about the older daughter, although it was the younger daughter who was there although no one in their right mind would ever think that somebody would make a joke about a 14 year old girl getting knocked up at a baseball game, although……”

There’s a generations old acronym that writers, song, comedy, etc consider gospel.

K.I.S.S
Keep it simple, stupid.

It’s bad enough that the joke was told in the first place.

Paying that kind of money for that kind of joke is beyond bad.

Not to mention in bad taste.