Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The Corn Dog Affair

By now everyone has seen the ridiculous picture of Michele Bachmann eating a corn dog at the Iowa State Fair, and of course there have been scores of lascivious comments about how it looks like she's performing fellatio and isn't that hilarious and ha ha Michele Bachman is going on down on a corn dog and so on and so on.

The jokes are tiresome, and they're cheap, and even taking into account what a nasty human being and even worse presidential prospect Bachmann is, they're not really fair. Yeah, remember this date, because this is going to be the first and last day the Runes ever sort of stands up for Michele Bachmann.

Let's approach this from a comedy standpoint: Corn dogs are not a new invention. They've been around since the '20s. Everyone knows what they look like. Everyone knows they go in your mouth. So if you believe that someone eating a corn dog appears to be performing fellatio, then you have to believe that everyone eating a corn dog appears to be performing fellatio. Thus, there is no joke. You can't pick and choose: "Hey, this person I don't like looks as if he or she is knob-gobbling that corn dog--but of course it looks perfectly respectable when I do it."

Some pundits and bloggers and Facebook commenters have said that publishing the unflattering picture of Bachmann is an attempt to sexually humiliate a female presidential candidate. (One person, apparently new to the planet, asked "Would the same picture have been published if it were a man with half a corn dog in his mouth?" Uh--yes.) Others are taking a more sophomoric approach, posting remarks implying that Bachmann is sure enjoying that phallic substitute, wink wink. The former group might be jumping to conclusions; the latter group's leering is misguided because, again, you can't make fun of someone else's enjoyment of, uh, corn dogs if it's something you enjoy yourself. After all, to borrow (and truncate) a quote from Lenny Bruce, "...that's one nice lady."

There are plenty of good reasons to make fun of Michele Bachmann, including the fact that she thinks aligning herself with the right-wing fringe is going to make her electable in November 2012. But hey, as a corn dog eater she has nothing to be ashamed of.

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