A rhapsody of laughter and tears

 If you're playing Uncle Vinnie's Comedy Club in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, either your career is freshly started or nearing its end.  Either way, Ariel Elias can call herself the best-known comedian in America this morning and she has a Trumpanzee to thank.  During Q&A on Saturday night she was asked, "Did you vote for Donald Trump?" a question she neatly sidestepped.  "Why would you ask me that knowing I'm the only Jew in this room?" Elias replied.  "Are you trying to get me killed?"  "So you voted for Biden?" the questioner persisted, "I could tell just by your jokes you voted for Biden!"  Having run out of words, the audience member then hurled an open can of beer at Elias, missing her, whereupon she coolly retrieved it and drank what was left.  She's the guest host on SNL next week.  (Not really, but she should be.)

Elias has received supportive tweets from all over, including Rep. Eric Swalwell and comedian Robin Tran, who said of Trump supporters, "They used to call the Comedy Store to ask and make sure nobody would be making fun of Trump that night.  Never seen any other group do that before."  We all saw Trump sweat blood as Barack Obama joked about him during the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner.  Apparently his droogs are snowflakes, too.  Fuck their feelings.

As for "your favorite Comedian (me!)," he's still holding increasingly weird hate rallies allegedly in support of Republican candidates but really just more evidence for an eventual plea of "not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect."  Last night in Arizona he repeated the debunked (by the National Archives) yarn about Obama stashing 33 million government documents in a Chicago furniture store.  Wait, it gets better:  George H.W. Bush "took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant...And it had a broken front door and broken windows.  Other than that it was quite secure."  No one has a clue what he was talking about but he demanded to know why Bush is not being prosecuted.  (He died in 2018.  Trump attended the funeral.)

To be fair, he continues to attack John McCain, who died in the same year.  The family did not invite him to that funeral.

In other mental illness news, Kanye "Bipolar" West is unhappy at the amount of attention Herschel "Concussions" Walker is getting just because he's running for office.  It's hard to see any other explanation for his most recent irruptions into the world's consciousness beginning with the very clever "White Lives Matter" shirts he and Candace Owens modeled for Paris Fashion Week.  Now his weirdly antisemitic exchanges with and about Sean "Diddy" Combs have been praised and then unpraised on Fox News's big white couch just before his Instagram and Twitter accounts were suspended.  "I'm a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I'm going death con 3 [sic] on JEWISH PEOPLE  The funny thing is I can't be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also"  I'm sure Tucker Carlson will have him back for a follow-up explanatory interview unless he gets other instructions from Moscow.

Little Vlad will need extra help from his US-based propagandists following the weekend's events.  After Ukraine made toothpicks out of the Kerch Strait bridge between Russia and Crimea Putin lashed out like a cranky four-year-old, hurling missiles into Kyiv and other cities.  Showing his sense of humor is equivalent to that of his former American puppet, Putin called the bridge bombing a "terrorist act."  Then he resumed lobbing Iranian drones at civilians.

Not to be left out, attention-whore Kim Jong-un launched two more missiles eastward to prove that North Korea can totally hit the Pacific Ocean.  Andy Warhol famously said that one day everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes (and this was before social media).  Some of us are hogging the time.

As the war continues to expand, Russian hackers are being blamed for attacks on the websites of fourteen American airports including LaGuardia, O'Hare, LAX, Hartsfield-Jackson and Des Moines.  No flights were disrupted.

A French designer named Jean Paul Gaultier (readers will know my fashion knowledge just about extends to Fruit of the Loom) is being sued by the Uffizi Galleries for "unauthorized use of images" from Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.  Really?  They're selling what the Guardian calls "a pair of stretch trousers with the buttocks area featuring the painting's god Zephyr," among other atrocities.  Why the museum that happens to own this fifteenth-century painting thinks it deserves a cut of the profits from tacky clothing is anyone's guess.  Maybe Gaultier should steal from the Louvre.

Who said, "I'd eat an Indian, no problem at all"?  Hint:  he's a finalist in the Brazil run-off election.  Yes, it's Jair Bolsonaro, the Bear Grylls of fascist politics.  The totally manly president said he wanted to see the "Indian" being cooked but the rest of his group begged off; a Yanomami leader says his people were never cannibals.  

Who said, "They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that!  Bullshit!"  Hint:  he's a senator.  He's spent his whole life in Alabama and never learned to code his racism.  If you said Tommy Tuberville take a Trump flag from the pile.

This just in:  We have found a Kanye supporter!  Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita praises him for his "fashion line, his independent thinking & for having opposing thoughts from the norm of Hollywood."  "According to them, you're not thinking correctly if you don't completely agree with them.  The left is dividing us, not uniting us."  I wonder who "them" could be.  Yes, Todd, we're trying to divide the bigots from the humans.  Stand over there.