It’s certainly helped the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity. Jonah Goldberg was a coal miner’s daughter.

I was discussing the other day w/an acquaintace the almost surrealistic LACK of humor in conservative comic strips, e.g. “Mallard Fillmore” and “Prickly City”. WTFisUWT?

Maybe it’s difficult to be funny when you’re kicking the downtrodden or something. Or maybe suck-uppitude is just not humorous. I dunno.

(and: put me down as another confused by “lipstick libertarian”.)

Except, y’know, if one were talking about the weather.

*and whether she is or not is SO not the issue, which is why Roy’s description bothered me. Did he miss the point?

McArdle and Althouse are gambling wrong. I think their formulation goes like this:

1) I don’t find this funny.
2) I hear feminists don’t have a sense of humor.
3) Therefore I’ll turn to feminism as an excuse to be humorless.

The problem with that formulation is that #2 is simply wrong. I mean, I’ve tripped across humorless feminists, but there are humorless people of all stripes, and in my experience, feminists are funnier on average than most people.

I get mocked and parodied every other day by some wingnut, and I have some advice to those who are touchy about this: The best strategy is to evaluate the piece indifferent to the fact that it’s about you. Is it funny? (99% of the time, wingnuts are too dumb to really be funny.) If not, pity the person. If it is—and I’ve seen a couple instances of mockery of me that was actually funny, on the theory that even morons occasionally luck out—then laugh at it.

The provenance and meaning of “lipstick libertarian” should be clear to disinterested readers. Indeed, I’m as uninteresting a reader as they come, and I… What? Oh.

Regardless, “lipstick libertarian” is not a way to call Ms. McArdle a lesbian. It is a more elegant formulation of how we use “schmibertarian” to label superficial libertarianism, as opposed to Jim Henley, or (on their good days) Radley Balko and Jacob Sullum. Much of the time, there’s no “there” there to McArdle’s libertarianism; hence she, and most other self-declared libertarians on the intertubes, are lipstick libertarians, regardless of gender.

Or perhaps Mr. Edroso was secretly referring to applying cosmetics to swine. That would have worked for me, but then I’m not a world-famous newspaper columnist.