ט Offensive Humor; Best of the Web; Howard Dean's Yeagh and Hillary Clinton Dancing. Mr. Taranto's Best of the Web rightly links to James Lileks's Yeagh Song of Howard Dean and other versions. That is cruel humor, but deserved. But note the following from

The Politics of Dancing
If you're an America Online user and didn't get our Friday column, here's why: AOL blocks e-mails containing a link to the Dancing Hillary Web page, which we cited in an item on Howard Dean scream remixes. Try sending the Dancing Hillay URL to an AOL account, and your e-mail will bounce with the following message: "The URL contained in your email to AOL members has generated a high volume of complaints."

But never fear, there is a way around this. We've set up a shortcut URL that AOL's filters shouldn't recognize: ...

I looked at the Dancing Hillary page. It is a graphic of a smiling doll-like Hillary Clinton figure that wiggles back and forth dancing. Mr. Taranto should not have linked to it. It is not really funny, and it is offensive, and those two things are related.

Consider first the Howard Dean Yeagh song, which consists of repetition of bits of his "I Have a Scream" speech with music, sirens, and odd sounds in the background. It is cruel, perhaps, but also funny, and both for the same reason: it captures a truth about Howard Dean that he would rather not have people know. To be sure, it exaggerates and caricatures that truth, but it actually conveys the truth better for that reason, just as a good painting can represent reality better than a photograph, or a good novel can represent it better than a scholarly history.

The problem with the Dancing Hillary is not that it is cruel. Perhaps it is, but it could not be as piercing as the Yeagh song simply because it is too far from reality. The Dancing Hillary shows a middle-aged woman doing a silly dance. That the woman is Hillary Clinton does not make it any more or less funny than if it were some nonentity. Mrs. Clinton is not known either for dancing a lot or for being the kind of woman you could never imagine dancing. The idea might be funnier either if the figure were Mrs. Gore (though then kissing her husband obtrusively, as at the convention, is what would be funnier) or Mrs. Thatcher (I have a hard time imagining her dancing), though it wouldn't be very good in either of those cases either. The famous Dancing Ito's on TV at the time of the O.J. Simpson trial were funny because they were ludicrous. Judge Ito dancing was so far from what we saw him do in court that it was funny. Hillary Clinton doing a silly dance is just stupid. It is humor on the same level as showing a picture of her with a mustache painted on. Since it reflects nothing particular about her, all that remains is the point that that middle-aged women shouldn't do silly dances, which is not an idea that needs much discussion.

[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/04.01.30a.htm . Erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.