Why John McCain Reminds Me of Captain Kangaroo

Captain Kangaroo from: http://www.tvparty.com

Here it is folks, the follow up to Barack Obama is the Boy Band of Politics.

In no particular order:

Captain Kangaroo was a portly gray haired gentleman, as is John McCain.

The Captain had a young assistant, Miss Debbie. McCain has a young assistant Sarah Palin.

The Captain had Grandfather Clock who would constantly fall asleep. McCain just does it himself.

The Captain is …

OK, that’s all I got.

When I was doing comedy more or less full time we would put together over two hours of material for a ninety minute show and run it all on the first night. We would slash what didn’t work and run it again on Saturday. Cut again for the next week and by the fourth night we had only the good stuff left. If we had some real attachment for a bit we would all agree to “work on it for later.” In ten years we never worked on any bit that didn’t work, we just dropped them. And whenever we forced a bit onstage, they were never as successful as others.

So here I am. In the interest of fairness I put a tagline on the last post that referred to non-existent material. Actually the only thing I ever had was the first note above. They are both old, chunky white haired guys.

This is a blog about using humor, so here is why I said it in that last post, and why i won’t do anything with it in this post.

There are differences between spoken humor and written humor. It is easier to toss stuff off when speaking because there is usually no record of what you say. Politics is the exception, because you can always count on the opposition to treat every mispronunciation as a verbal insult and every slip of the tongue as a hint to the candidate’s true malevolent purpose. But thankfully we ordinary folks can get by with saying things we might never write. Writing requires an accuracy of thought and expression that is compensated for in live speech by inflection, repetition, hesitation, volume and all the other tools in an orators bag of tricks.

So if I was speaking, I could toss off the McCain and Captain Kangaroo line at the end of the list, get a laugh and move on. One or two may come up afterward and mention the MCain/Kangaroo reference, but no one would expect me to come back in a week and speak again.

However I am writing. And people all over the world who have read the first installment are now looking for the next.

I could just ignore it all and move on. That is a valid strategy, usually the safest strategy, and actually what I would recommend for you. But I wanted to do this. I wanted to remind you that you control what you say. And you do not have to explain or elaborate on a remark you tossed off in an attempt to get a laugh. Some times, as in this case, all the humor is in the initial mental impression that McCain/Kangaroo creates. If you really think one of these is a good idea, just tell yourself that you’ll “work on it for later.”

Now, that being said, as regular readers can tell, I don’t know all there is to know about humor. I imagine some of you out there may have thought of ways that John McCain really is like Captain Kangaroo. Feel free to share these in comments.