Thursday, February 21, 2008 Seares: Clowning over our corruption By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
THEY say genuine humor is kindly and gracious, which points out the "weakness of humanity" but holds no contempt and leaves no sting.
Not Filipino humor that politics unleashes. Not the variety the Senate hearings on the scrapped ZTE deal have been dishing out.
What's the humor in "president evil," a take-off on "Resident Evil" movies and inspired by the high-grade "Gloria is evil" gossip?
Very little, though it amuses TV watchers outside the Palace, mostly those who've been pining for "The Day" when the President flees or gets evicted.
The weirdly creative mind of the senator who concocted the phrase "president evil" also produced the spin that star witness Jun Lozada might have sex with Cabinet secretary Romulo Neri, along with two other men.
He's no Lopez
And "J. Lo" to humor the man? A smitten but irreverent crowd shouted the name to a beaming Jun at La Salle, whose services now include an upscale shelter for desperate whistleblowers.
J. Lo aims to flatter, but does it? Jun doesn't look, move, or sound a bit like Jennifer Lopez, or maybe he does. Is it a dig on promiscuity in dalliances, sexual or political? Whatever the intent, it's a put-down, a stab as mean as the dig on Neri and his alleged male lovers.
As a people, we are praised for being able to laugh at ourselves in times of crisis. Humor is a mechanism to cushion pain, we are told.
Self-deprecating jokes work for stand-up comics' audiences. But there's some danger when we as a nation begin to take a gross national disease like corruption as a joke.
Evils, resident or president, may yet have the last laugh.
