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Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Obama were cleaning a gun and it went off and hit Michelle in the shoulder? But that didn’t happen.

What if Harry Reid was in a hotel room with Nancy Pelosi? Then we could go to town! Yes, the only problem is: It didn’t happen.

How about a joke about Amy Fisher being at Yankee Stadium with Palin? But she wasn’t there. Neither was Bristol Palin.

This isn’t a question of whose ox is gored. A joke is supposed to start with actual events and then veer into fiction for the punch line. Here’s Jay Leno’s joke on Palin’s pregnant daughter: “Governor Palin announced over the weekend that her seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. And you thought John Edwards was in trouble before!”35 That makes sense because Palin’s seventeen-year-old daughter had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and Edwards, unlike A-Rod, had impregnated his mistress.

If art is going to confuse anyone, by rights it should confuse stupid people.* But the only people who could possibly find Letterman’s Palin joke funny were idiots who don’t know Bristol Palin had a child out of wedlock and who don’t know that A-Rod hasn’t gotten any of his girlfriends pregnant. Stupid people get to laugh and smart people can’t because they’re wondering, “Wait—was Bristol at the Yankees game? Did A-Rod get someone pregnant? Did I miss a news story?”

Letterman’s writers have gone from Olympian in the early days, to imitators in the middle years, to finger-in-the-wind hacks who want to go home early in the later years. But as long as they attack mob-approved targets, everyone pretends not to notice.

Indeed, like the high school bullies studied by researchers at University of California at Davis, some liberals were psychologically compelled to describe Letterman’s provably unfunny joke as hilarious out of a desperate quest for popularity.

Pleading over the airwaves for Letterman to have him on, Dick Cavett—inventor of the “name drop”—called the lame joke “witty” and “wonderful” and said he would do the joke himself if he had one as good “as delivered by Letterman’s writers.” Being his own Boswell, Cavett then repeated the jokes “most people remember” from his own column on Palin. (Illustrating why he’s not in the top status group, Dick Cavett said, “I thought that referring to Sarah’s slutty stewardess looks probably was over the line,” adding, “I think he should apologize for that. Not to her, but to the stewardesses.” Ba-da-bump!)36

Air America’s Sam Seder proclaimed Letterman’s bomb of a joke—“in the final analysis”—“a funny joke.” He boasted that jokes about Palin were “like T-ball … it’s not even softball. I mean, she just literally holds it out there.” (Literally!) And yet, he was unable to come up with any jokes himself, easy as it was—literally.37

How about a Top Ten list for Dave’s “Late Show interns I would have knocked up if they weren’t on the pill because no woman could stand having a child who looks like me”? Just a few months after making nonsensical jokes about Palin’s daughter getting “knocked up,” it came out that Letterman had been carrying on with interns and other Late Show female employees for years, despite having a wife—who had also worked for him—and child on the side. The only way Dave can get a woman to sleep with him is by preying on women underneath him professionally, who want to move up.

A certain kind of idiot thinks he’s made a great intellectual point by saying, “Follow the money.” Every bush-league Marxist assumes the only reason anyone ever does anything is for money. But as we have seen, lots of people also behave certain ways to be megalomaniacal and suck up to the New York Times.

Once you have a certain amount of money, all kinds of things become more important to you than the next dollar—being thought of as a sensitive, cool, deeply caring person, for example. People will spend a lot of money to hang out with actresses. They will never spend so much that they become part of the middle