Customer Reviews

Red V. Blue: The Red Starter's Guide to the Great State Debate

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Steve Sweeney said it best about a Republican who came up with a gag events listing for the 2004 Democratic National Convention: "He's not a joke writer." Maybe it has something to do with the fact that humor is the exercise of a superiority complex and that conservatives appear to have an overcharged inferiority complex, or that it requires challenging established authority and conservatives reflexively side with authority, but with the exceptions of Mitt Romney, Bill Weld and PJ O'Rourke they can't write a joke to save humanity from extinction. While Laura Bush was able to get the crowd roaring, she was shredding Republicans at the time. Even Dennis Miller was funnier when he was unafilliated and ripping both sides of the political divide a new one.
It read like Baer and Boeke had been ordered by their publisher to put out a counterargument to BLUE VS. RED, and they just dashed it off in a couple of hours so they could get an early start on the weekend. While it does make you think at times, such as the fact that 1.78% of red staters are farmers, the rest of them are recycled from BLUE VS. RED with some subtle rewriting to fit the intended audience, and even then they're hit-or-miss. When those recycled jokes aren't making the rare valid point (if red staters make up only 6% of American tourists overseas, who's more likely to be promoting the Ugly American stereotype?) they're working along the weak yeah-but rebuttal to ineffectively show superiority over blue staters ("Yeah, Britney Spears is perpetuating every trailer-trash stereotype out there, but at least she isn't having sex outside of marriage like Christina Aguilera!"). Even the Blue Stater Ten Commandments read like the Red Stater ones from BLUE VS. RED with only a handful of word changes.

If you want good Democrat mocking, you're going to have to go to an independent comedian or even an insider giving his crew the Carl Hiaasen treatment, such as stuff on THE DAILY SHOW or pre-sellout Dennis Miller.