What's funny in a week of disasters?

By Tom Johnson

It was a tough week to find humor.

Tornadoes, flooding, trees falling, roofs caving in. Even though I find it funny that we Californians struggle under storms they would laugh off in other parts of the country, I still don’t find them truly funny.

And I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to live in Haiti right now. Or imagine all the heroes from the U.S. who are risking everything to rescue people they don’t even know.

It makes me proud to be an American. At a time when a lot of the world has ill feelings toward the United States, when a disaster hits, I ask you, who is the first responder?

I don’t need your answer.

I know. It’s us.

When other countries, mostly those who gave safe harbor to terrorists, take pride in burning American flags or a president in effigy, we are busy sending an aircraft carrier, made into a hospital, to a country of need.

Our young people risking life and limb.

I remember it from the tsunami in Indonesia.

And now, I see it again. In fact, someone all t familiar to us, Tim Riley, our former Newport Beach Fire Chief, has a son, Grant, who was among the first responders on the tarmac of March Air Force Base, headed for Haiti.

And so, as I said on the front end, it was a tough week.

But, if you know me, and a lot of you do, I look for the fun part of life.

And so, let me discuss with you two things that tickled the old funny bone on a otherwise dismal week.

First, there was the sighting of a tornado yesterday in Costa Mesa.

Tornadoes are a bad thing. Even I admit that.

But what’s funny is when the news hit it said the following: “The awning was just ripping off right in front of my eyes. Giant shards of wood and plywood flew,” said Clifford Chapman, who lives in the Orange Coast Mobile Home Park in Costa Mesa across the street from the industrial park.

Here’s the question I have: Why whenever the news covers a tornado is a mobile home park involved?

No matter where it is, down south, in the Midwest, it always has “a tornado struck a mobile home park today in …"

Do tornadoes only occur in mobile home parks?

To me, that’s funny.

Secondly, and to be honest, covering national news is not my job, but I find it funny that the national healthcare bill seems to depend on a senatorial election in Massachusetts.

A little background, Ted Kennedy, the longtime Massachusetts senator, who passed away recently, called universal health care his “cause of life.”

So now, when the Democrats appear to be within one vote of a filibuster to make certain Kennedy’s lifetime dream comes true, first he dies, and then the state of Massachusetts elects a Republican senator for the first time since 1972.

As Maxwell Smart would have said, “We missed it by that much!”

Have a great week and stay dry.

Tom Johnson is the co-publisher of the Daily Voice.

Comments

[Paul Mitchell]

What? What was that you said, Tom? I can't hear you here in the "Cone of Silence"