It's Lent, and we all know what that means: time for limericks.
humor
A good joke can reveal the distance between what is and what should be.
The sparkle of James McBride's stories
Five-Carat Soul is filled with hilarious storytelling, unusual characters, and stark realities.
The earnest, hilarious Al Franken
The senator's jokes are still funny, even if Trump has made his satire obsolete.
Esther's story would be infuriating if it wasn't so over-the-top ridiculous.
So, Sen. Paul filibustered and received brief assurances that at least there are some limits to the Obama adminstration's policy of targeted assassination. Alex Kane—in a Short Imagined Monologue, one of my favorite features at McSweeney's humor site—spells out some others. I for one would be reassured if the White House actually said this.
These parables are like God's joke in the form of an invasive species.
This "Which denomination are you?" flowchart from Lutheran Satire has been making the rounds this week.
Much of the most delightfully silly online humor follows a particular formula: a single good idea that alters or plays on a pop-cultural artifact; execution that relies on computer technology, but not too much (some simple Photoshop work, a couple lines of code); loads of nostalgia.
A critic once called Clyde Edgerton the "love child of Dave Barry and Flannery O'Connor"—a reflection of the fact that his novels are both dark and funny.