How, pray tell, did we ever survive America’s endless campaigns without comedy? Even those Michele Bachmann jokes didn’t make themselves up all on their own. Do we have to make it an Olympic sport?In 1968, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour got the first broadcast chuckles started with “Pat Paulsen for President.” I can remember, and have the AARP card to prove it. Producer Lorne Michaels got Saturday Night Live going with slapstick skits lampooning the late President Gerald Ford (R), America’s golf course menace. While we have shed a lot of polyester next to our skin in the meantime, no politician or talking head has the “American exceptionalism” to endure years of non-stop politicking on their own.

After being reelected by a comfy margin few expected, President Obama readies himself for his second term. Defeated G.O.P. Quarter Billion Dollar Man, Mitt Romney, starts to question whether the hokey Kolob star in that Book of Mormon he terrorized France with “serving” as a missionary instead of going to Vietnam really has any magic left, if there was any to begin with.

German actor Bruno Ganz continues to enjoy after glow in myriad YouTube videos applying his masterful Adolf Hitlerian rant scene in Der Untergang (Downfall) (2004) in ways his production company never imagined. In the mega-donor post mortem, melba toast Mitt isn’t screaming about all the hundreds of millions from fellow rich folks which he pissed away, with the fire of a demented Deutsche dictator. It’s more like a whine. I’m sure Queen Ann R-money is already plotting her revenge designer shopping spree to show prairie princess Anita Perry and Star Wars death star helmet-headed Callista “Our Lady of Tiffany’s” Gingrich how paybacks are hell. When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.The President hasn’t handed out many Presidential Medals of Freedom lately, but America’s comedy writers and comedians deserve a big thank you from a grateful, campaign-weary nation. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, late-night monologue hosts, and the creative writers who keep them funny all deserve our gratitude. Don’t forget Comedy Central. “Corporations are people, my friend.”

Jimmy Fallon as Michele Bachmann in drag might have been a good test of the effectiveness of her hubby, sashaying Missus Marcus’s “pray away the gay” reparative therapy. Marcus Bachmann’s defense of Provincetown “to the last man” on Cape Cod didn’t work all that well for half-term Sen. Scott “Beefcake” Brown (R-Wall Street). Brown cracked “Thank God” on the fact Sen-elect Prof. Elizabeth Warren (D) worked her way through law school with her clothes on, but it was Brown who ended up “losing his shirt.”

Anyone who still doesn’t buy evolution hasn’t seen how congressional Republicans adapted to the latest “bimbos, brass, & Benghazi” side show which didn’t take long to forment. Perhaps buffoonish Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.) hasn’t pondered the election results on how Golden State Left Coast conservatives might have become an endangered species with the possible exception of Orange County, California’s Disneyland version of Father Damien’s leper colony in the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Ask the late crooner Sonny Bono’s widow, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R).

In a 236 year old democracy, we’re still figuring out how not to screw up a vote. Despite howling about “activist judges,” too many incumbents have already deployed Juris Doctor SEAL teams to forestall the inevitable.

Speaking of hunkering down in bunkers, disgraced army officer and Tea Party gefreiter “hero” Rep. Allen “Loose Cannon” West (R-Fla.) desperately moves lawyer armies of his imagination around the battle map. His Hummer is parked outside. Pistol and cyanide departures are so 1945, never mind West’s troubled history with handguns. Somebody will give him a lobbying gig on K Street. West has been offered political asylum in Georgia.

In the film Casablanca (1942), Humphrey Bogart told Ingrid Bergman: “We’ll always have Paris.” We still have Michele Bachmann on the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

Comedy is not dead: Google “Santorum.”



