“The only way to upset the power structure in your communities is to goad them, confuse them, irritate them and, most of all, make them live by their own rules. If you make them live by their own rules, you destroy them. And never forget that ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Comedy is our friend. Throw the kitchen sink at them!” – from Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radical Comedians.”
Alinsky
I never really had any insight into the pure comic genius of Saul Alinsky until I saw his new age Method followers display their considerable chops on the national stage. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, the Master’s ostentatious and envelope-pushing Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner-like proteges, whose hilarious ACORN skits also showed brilliant flashes of the late great Allen Funt. The Mysterious Mister X, the L.A. street comic who “Alinskyed” Faris Alkhateeb’s boredom-fueled Obama Joker art into an urban poster as devilishly humorous as Hannibal Lecter, also made as big a national splash as a 300-pound chub doing a cannonball into a crowded public kiddie pool.
Now I see the funny side. In fact, I’m getting Alinsky-inspired comic epiphanies of my own now. Who can say that deep down, that pathetic weepy drama queen performance by Nancy Pelosi on national TV pleading for people to “just stop it!” wasn’t the old Alinsky talking? Unfortunately for Madame Speaker, I’ve got the new age mischievous spirit of Saul Alinsky tugging at my muse. Struck me right away: the Pelosi video from 2006 in which Madame Speaker, addressing a moonbat rally, called Lefty anti-war protesters “patriots” and praised disruptions of town halls as a public service.
Eureka! What a side-by-side video comedy skit that would make! First cheering on the mad Lefty crowd like Ernst Roem rallying the Brownshirts, then all mournful like Vivien Leigh at the end of Gone With The Wind. Frankly, Madame Speaker, not only do I not give a damn, I’m going to hoist you on your own goddamn Saul Alinsky petard! Just like the Master would have wanted me to.
Another Alinsky-inspired banana peel laff riot might be editing videos of any Pelosi-like liberal Democrat Congressional reps who tearfully pleaded for support of the massive ObamaCare and Cap-and-Tax bills, then joked about not reading them. Getting the Alinsky hang of it now, people? Saul Alinsky was a comedic poet, and we didn’t even know it. Who’d a-thunk it, except perhaps those who knew him best? You know, I’ll bet if you canvassed his old neighborhoods in Chicago and Carmel, it would be just like the SNL interviews of neighbors who knew Buckwheat’s assassin:
REPORTER: “Did you know Mister Alinsky was a news-making community organizer?”
NEIGHBOR: “Yes. Very nice man.”
REPORTER: “Ever think he’d become the world’s most subversive political comedian?”
NEIGHBOR: “Oh, sure. That’s all he ever talked about.”
Here’s where I need your Alinsky-like help, my fellow mischievous political terrorist comedians, which we Americans all are at heart. Fight The Power! We The People are all in this together. I’m a comedy writer, mostly. My own brand of Alinsky humor is subversion with words. Don’t know the first fucking thing about making videos. That’s the director’s job, at least until I can take that two-day crash course that greatly helped Tarantino, Rodroguez and Chris Nolan, okay?
Doesn’t help me now. So would some helpful street comedians please throw those sharply contrasting Pelosi and other damning LibDem Lefty videos together in Alinsky-like subversively comic fashion? You can even edit in the videos where Madame Speaker first screams to the skies about CIA lies, then fumbles and stumbles on the air for five minutes trying to remember her own. Make a whole skit out of it. Scenes with biased reporters getting “Alinskyed” when they preach about objectivity write themselves. And it will all be classic Saul Alinksy and SNL-style comedy fun, fun, fun!
I am finding more and more that the Alinsky Method of comedy is manic brilliance. As sophisticated and erudite as Tracy and Hepburn, yet as moronically slapstick as the Three Stooges. And that is the sheer Wile E. Coyote genius of the Alinsky Method. Turn the whole show on its head for all sides. It is as insidiously and comically brilliant as the wave of professional hit men sent to the Oktoberfest in Munich to assassinate Inspector Clouseau, then wound up killing each other off to the last man.
For forty years the American Left has been having all the fun adhering to the Alinsky Method. Even drove its most charismatic protege into the White House, and his fellow Alinskyites to near-absolute power in Congress. Sans humor, but what do want from the Left? Yet the blackly comic Alinsky Method of today may yet drive that same humorless old school Alinsky army to Exit Stage Left faster than you can say “ACORN!” And that is the sheer subversive comic ingenuity of the Great Mr. Alinsky.
I know that wherever he is today (and I really hope it’s Heaven, he deserves it), the great Saul Alinsky is smiling down on the absurdity of it all. He must have been rolling on the streets of gold when he saw that first Pimp and Ho video, at least as much as when he saw Eddie Murphy’s White Like Me skit. Life Is Beautiful, and so is Saul Alinsky. May he forever Rest in Peace. At least during the times he isn’t falling to pieces over the ACORN videos, and glowing in the realization that it is all his fault.
Alinsky seminar over. Here’s your reading assignment: the Master’s Playboy interview. Let’s get busy, people! Oh, and if want a tagline for my recommended Pelosi comedy montage, my pick is PELOSI LIES, THE CIA AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH DIES! It’s all in how you pitch it, folks. I would also recommend as a great source of material the Alinksy-like pics and videos of Lefty protests in the past, for both side-by-sides and slogans of our own. Just like the Viet Cong scavenged our unexploded bombs to use against us, but much better. It’s all in fun, and nobody loses an eye.
God Bless You Mr. Alinsky, wherever you are. Wiseass punk! Ledger’s Joker ain’t got nothin’ on you!