I Need to Work Up Some Rage to Get My Comedy Back

The oddest thing has happened to me: Suddenly, I don’t care.

I used to care. Honestly, I really did. I used to get mad – infuriated, even – about the damndest things: politics, school, stupid people… well, really, that’s about all I would get mad about. But that anger often resulted in Taftese comedy classics, including approximately 84 columns about George W. Bush. Obviously, most of those columns are unpublished. Here’s a clip from one of the lost George W. columns:

The biggest problem I have with George W. Bush isn’t his stupidity; it’s his international policy that threatens to enlarge the already wide gap between the United States and the international community.

Ha-HA! ZING! I should have published that one just for that line, but the rest of it is pretty dry. Ho, man: “International community.” God, I kill me.

However, my brilliance aside, I can’t seem to find that touch of anger that made me so damn brilliant. When I was at Boston U., I got good and angry about an institution of higher education that treated their students with a level of respect typically only relegated to pre-schoolers handling mealworms or baby chicks.

I arrived in fabulous Columbia, Missouri with just a few months until the very angering 2000 presidential election, which infuriated me to the point of publication with echo/MU Student News.

When I got out of school, I was mad about the job market. So I wrote a column about it. But then I got a job, and ceased to be concerned about the job market. You may call that short-sighted, but I just call it American. I’ll probably get mad at old people in a few years when I have enough work experience to try to take their jobs. Then I’ll write a column called “Old People: Why Won’t They Die?”

Now I have my own apartment, too. So I can’t even complain about living with my parents. In fact, there’s very little I have left in my life that I can really, genuinely bitch about (except for bitching about the fact that I have nothing to bitch about, apparently). Let’s review:

So, to sum up, things really aren’t all that bad. And that just pisses me off.

Original Post Date: November 29, 2003