Literary Corner: Tucker Face

Getty Photo via NBC.

A pungent lyric by former bowtie model Tucker Carlson, now enjoying a second career as a professional brow-knitter, the Man Who Looks Perplexed at Fox:

Song of Triumph 

by Tucker Carlson

When's the last time
you heard a liberal laugh?
And not sardonically or bitterly
or in rage but actual mirth.

Like, 'I'm amused hahaha
look at me I'm carefree.'
Have you seen that in the
last year and a half?

At a superficial level, it may seem unseemly for him to be taking so much pleasure in the idea that he and his political faction have destroyed the peace of mind of an entire class of people since the 2016 election, but I think there's something deeper going on in the alliteration—the leap of L's and rumble of H's surrounding the central "hahaha" as if to suggest a subtextual "lalala (I can't hear you [laughing])", a Tucker face of deep suspicion that those liberals may be laughing (in their non-actual, sardonic or bitter way) at him.

And a kind of endearing Martian-anthropologist sense of wonderment when he speculates on the mysteries of the human laughter mechanism, that it must be aimed at getting ("look at me") attention that isn't going to him.

The right is starting to get better at comedy and it's making lefties nervous. pic.twitter.com/8iRWwgtd7a

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) July 24, 2018

Fake interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by a "comedian" called Allie Beth Stuckie, posted without my realizing that, as I learn from Roy, there could be people online who don't realize it's fake. I'm leaving it here as the most pure and ghastly bitterness- and rage-fueled example I've ever seen of the rightwing fantasy of what "comedy" is probably like.