That Romney would go full Atlas Shrugged on the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street… is this a performance art piece?
— hodgman (@hodgman) September 18, 2012
John Hodgman, one of our most popular Ask Anything guests, laments the humbling nature of political humor online:
When you have something that is as clear-cut—as much as Mitt Romney would like it not to be—as what he said [on the 47%], it truly does seem like there’s a race on Twitter and other social-networking platforms to be the first to arrive with the joke. I think this happens now with most major, or even minor, news events. And anxiety is born out of the fact that those of us who make jokes professionally or semi-professionally—or in my case, literary humor bon mots—are more aware than ever, because of the cloud hive mind of Twitter, just how many smart, funny people are out there.
It truly is a matter of time, and often not very much time, before what you might imagine in your head has already been done several times on Twitter. There are a lot of minds working on the same problem at the same time. You’d hope that would have some practical application, like curing deadly diseases. But for the most part all of the minds are working on responding to Mitt Romney’s dumb thing.
Hodgman’s book That Is All is now available in paperback and audiobook. Listen to the first ten minutes, featuring Paul Rudd, here. Grab the Complete World Knowledge box set here.
The Dish 