Mailbag Answers, Vince Neil's Birthday Edition!

Löts öf ünnecessary ümlauts in hönör öf the Mötley Crüe singer

Built from photos by Underway in Ireland and Oxalis Atindriyaratri.

*NOTE: I plan to answer some of the questions I didn’t get to on the podcast this weekend.

Hello! February 8 is, indeed, Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil’s birthday, so let’s address the elephant in the room: The umlauts in “Mötley Crüe” don’t do anything. “Motley Crue” = “Mötley Crüe”. The rock & roll power umlauts don’t change the pronunciation one bit. I know I’m being pedantic; I know that ‘80s hair metal was more about getting some stank on your hang-down than observing the rules of Germanic grammar. But I feel compelled to ask: Is there not room for both?

Now that I’ve righted that historic wrong, let’s dive into the mail bag.

From Regina: Will Trump ever end up in jail?

No, I don’t think so. It’s not that I don’t think he’s guilty — my opinions on Trump’s smorgasboard of legal dustups are:

• New York business fraud case: Not guilty and thanks for making this unnecessarily complicated, Alan Bragg;

• Georgia conspiracy-to-overturn-the-election case: Guilty and thanks for making this unnecessarily complicated, Fani Willis;

• Federal conspiracy-to-overturn-the-election case: Guilty;

• Federal classified documents case: Mega-guilty;

• 14th Amendment ballot issue: Let’s talk about something else.

The 14th Amendment issue couldn’t result in jail time, and the New York case seems unlikely to result in jail time. The others could lead to jail, but I’m guessing that they won’t for this reason: I think that the justice system is a lot more subjective than we like to admit.

I would be nice if we were governed by clear rules. In reality, we’re governed by rules that are subject to a great deal of interpretation. That’s especially true when dealing with areas that lack legal precedent, and there’s no precedent for an American president trying to overturn an election or hiding classified documents in his crapper.¹ When dealing with grey areas, I think that considerations other than the law tend to dominate.

My guess is that people — judges especially — will shy away from taking the momentous and unprecedented step of jailing a former president. That’s especially true if Trump is a candidate for president or is currently the president. It’s just so odd to tell voters “you can’t pick this guy — he’s in jail.” So, I think there might be some sort of plea bargain, or a non-jail sentence, or some other deus ex machina that lets voters choose who they want even if one of their choices is a gigantic crook.

From Carina: Does recycling help the earth, or is it bullshit?

The prevailing wisdom when I left EPA ten years ago — and which may have changed since then — was that it is almost always good to recycle cardboard and aluminum. The usefulness of recycling glass and plastic depends on where you live. Composting is a disgusting waste of time and serves only to mark the composter as a social degenerate.

So, my answer is that recycling sometimes helps the Earth, but is often bullshit. However, in terms of providing a sense of moral superiority for very little effort, recycling is still pretty good for that.

From Mike: I've always wondered how people who write jokes for a living make sure that they don't write the same (or same-ish) joke multiple times. Do you have a process for going back sometimes to check and make sure that you haven't previously compared, say, Mitch McConnell to a snowman melting in the Sun?

Holy shit — in my last answer, I forgot to mention the most important type of recycling: Joke recycling. It’s vital. I have had exactly six original thoughts in my life, and the most recent one occurred in 2009. Therefore, the only way I can make it in this business is by reusing old material like Kevin Costner in Waterworld (which is a joke that I wrote in 1995).

In all seriousness: I try to avoid writing the same joke multiple times. My “process” is searching my past work via Google and Substack’s search engine. For example, by searching my old articles, I can see that the Mitch McConnell joke is yours, not mine. Except that you failed to include a link to a notarized, Writers Guild-approved copyright claim, so that joke is actually now my joke, too.

I’ve spent so many years toiling in various joke factories that I have no idea what I’ve written. Sometimes, people ask me if I wrote some Last Week Tonight thing, and I honestly don’t know — the other LWT writers have had the same experience. Many times, I’ll remember a joke, but I can’t remember if I published it on IMBW or wrote it and then edited it out. And then I’ll wonder if it was my joke in the first place, and then I’ll remember that it was something that I saw on Punky Brewster in 1986. I’ve been in this game a long time, and my brain is properly fried, so all I can do is sail forward and hope for the best like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

From Red: Why o why won't Biden do more hippie punching?

I don’t know! I wish that he would! If anyone missed my screed on the myriad benefits of “hippie punching” (which involves no actual violence), here’s that.

There are aphorisms in politics about the importance of placating the lunatics on your side. “Consolidate your base” is one. Better to have people “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in” was Lyndon Johnson’s colorful way of putting it. This conventional wisdom — like most conventional wisdom — probably doesn’t get questioned very often. I’d guess that Biden’s advisers periodically say “we need to throw progressives a bone”, and instead of igniting a deep discussion about the cost-benefit analysis of such a move, Biden just does something like the natural gas thing he did last week. And that hands activists a “win” as long as they don’t realize that Biden will probably just approve the gas terminal after the election (and activists don’t seem to have realized that or are pretending to not have realized that for fundraising reasons).

There are certainly conditions in which placating your base is the vote-maximizing strategy. I just don’t think those conditions are present right now. I think perhaps 80 percent of voters hate the far left, and Biden can win votes by figuratively (or maybe literally) flipping the bird to extremists. The far left, of course, constantly threatens to withhold their vote if they don’t get their way; right now, they’re threatening to break with Biden over Gaza. But Americans back Israel by a more than two-to-one margin. With fringe voters, there’s always a point when you say “I’m not going to do that,” and I think that point should come sooner rather than later.

From Jeremiah: As a comedy writer, I'm curious how you think about the 'punching up vs punching down' debates your field sometimes has.

Was watching Shane Gillis's standup recently and there were parts that I thought were really funny and clever, but also parts that seemed weirdly mean. Like, it felt unnecessarily mean in a downwards direction. I'm not trying to cancel the guy but it was distinctly the weakest, least funny part of his set. I'm not sure if it's that I've changed or the culture has changed, but it definitely feels like something has changed.

I thought the Shane Gillis special was generally funny though there were also some bits that I wouldn’t do. Without parsing his set line-by-line, I’ll say that the general concept of “punching down” is widely accepted in comedy, but how it’s been thought about in recent years has gotten nuts.

“Don’t punch down” basically means “don’t make fun of the weak and vulnerable”. It’s a key concept in comedy because being harsh or mean-spirited to people who don’t deserve it isn’t funny — it ruins the comedy vibe. The nature and context of the ribbing matter a ton; Don Rickles built a career saying things that would get him punched out if he said them in a bar, but people laughed because they knew he didn’t mean any of it. That “hey, we’re all friends here” vibe is crucial; when things feel adversarial, you’re fucked.

Of course, The Discourse has addressed this concept in the dumbest possible way (which seems to be the discourse’s function). First, “punching” has been interpreted to mean “talking about in any way whatsoever, regardless of message or intent”. Twitter scolds either don’t get irony or pretend not to get it so that they can get their scolding nut off, and in most cases I suspect it’s the latter. They claim to see no difference between saying something and meaning it, saying something in jest, and saying something inappropriate and the joke is that it’s an inappropriate thing to say. If Don Rickles was starting out today, he’d be extradited to The Hague midway through his first set.

The “down” in “punching down” has been interpreted to mean “referencing any person or group deemed protected.” This is one of those concepts that has come to be considered progressive even though I feel that it’s Song of the South-level racist. Because in this framing, “marginalized groups” — e.g. trans people, non-white people, women (but not white women) — are always weak, vulnerable, and in need of protection by We, The Righteous Upper Class. They need to be excused from our game because they are too easily injured. Hannah Gadsby — the most visible champion of this viewpoint — basically argued that all jokes about gay people are harmful. But aren’t good-natured jokes that signal “I’m fine, you can’t hurt me” actually empowering? When we say “this group is fragile, you must not touch", aren’t we treating people like children and consigning them to permanent lesser/disempowered status? I think the answer is clearly “yes”, and I think that some of the “punching down” dialogue is actually people projecting a sublimated feeling of superiority.

From Jason: If you could tag team with another substack columnist in an MMA match against a bear, who would you pick?

I get asked this a lot.

My first thought is Freddie deBoer, because he works out and has persevered through things a lot more harrowing than a li’l ol’ bear fight. But a lot of my readers come from Freddie, and if he gets mauled by a bear, that would hurt my numbers. So not him.

Matt Yglesias is a candidate because he’s written five thousand words a week for 20 years, and that level of tenacity should strike fear into all creatures in the animal kingdom. I’ve also seen him in person recently and he has slimmed down and is in bear-fighting shape. But I’m a bit worried that he might pause mid-fight to tweet.

My pick is Andrew Sullivan — you gotta fight a bear with a bear, right? That guy was gay in the 80s, and I think if you’re gay pre-circa-2005, not much scares you after that. He’s also still Catholic and still English — he clearly gives zero fucks. So, yeah, going with Sullivan, perhaps a View From Your Window in the near future will include the former New Republic editor and me proudly wearing the hide of a once-confident grizzly.

Thanks for the questions!

---

---

1. Before you say “other presidents had classified documents!” (which they did): They had them, but they didn’t hide them. If Trump had just turned over the documents when the FBI asked, he wouldn’t be in this mess.