It’s been a rotten week to be John Kerry. His party is gearing up for a mid-term vote on Tuesday that seems likely to give them a majority in the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, while sending some high-profile Republicans down in flames and consigning George W. Bush to lame-duck status.
And then, with one poorly-delivered joke, Kerry handed his opponents a great big club to hammer Democrats with.
In case you missed the story, here’s what happened: Kerry had been about to make a joke at the President’s expense, saying that if you didn’t study hard and succeed in school, you might end up presiding over a quagmire in Iraq. Instead, though, he delivered the punchline as “you get stuck in Iraq.” Republican spin doctors jumped on this as Kerry saying the troops in Iraq are stupid and uneducated.
(N.B. – I gather many conservative bloggers don’t buy this account. Here’s my methodology: to judge whether Kerry was intending to ridicule U.S. troops, I’m using a sophisticated flowchart with questions on it like “Is Kerry trying to commit political suicide? (Y/N)”, “Which would constitute political suicide: ridiculing U.S. soldiers or ridiculing an unpopular President?” and “Is Kerry aware of this? (Y/N)”.)
It’s a little like the punctuation exercises we went through in school, where moving a single comma could dramatically alter the meaning of a sentence. (Remember the story about the panda who walks into a restaurant, chows down on a meal, pulls out a handgun, fires off several rounds and then calmly walks out the door? When asked why, the panda pulls out a nature guide that describes panda behaviour as “eats, shoots and leaves“.) Here, though, the confusion isn’t over punctuation – it’s over flubbing a line.
Every speaker does this, and some have bad days more often than others. If you’re lucky, all that happens is a line that ought to get a belly laugh instead gets a smattering of oh-I-see-what-she-was-trying-to-say chuckles. Less happily, sometimes the speaker leaves out a word like “not”, reverses the meaning of what he’d intended and triggers a riot.
It doesn’t even have to be the speaker’s fault. In a contentious field like politics, your opponents are always looking for gaffes, and happy to find them even if they aren’t really there. A less-than-charitable interpretation of your joke can reverberate through the media echo chamber, and before you know it you’re off-message for the rest of the day… or week.
It’s happened to me (and, more important, to my client). I once handed a political leader a joke that made the mildest possible comment on gender relations, only to see it rebound in the media (and then on the doorstep) as an anti-male slur. And if we’d had a half-hour one-on-one with every reporter in the country, we could probably have explained why it wasn’t really anti-male… but the election would have been long ago decided.
You don’t have the time to waste explaining a one-liner, muffed or misinterpreted. So when you’re writing jokes, imagine what would happen if your speaker only managed to deliver part of the punchline. And give your jokes the kind of hard look that your speaker’s worst enemy would give them. Because trust me – they will.
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