I like to be a happy warrior. I make jokes about this stuff, in part as a response to my troubles with the Canadian Islamic Congress [which brought the hate-speech complaint]. I had the best part of a day in that stupid courtroom in Vancouver. They were learnedly discoursing on the tone of my jokes, and one thing I've always regarded as very important since then is to keep on making them," he said.
"There was a line I used to use in the National Post. 'Is it just me or does Ramadan seem to come round earlier every year?'' In fact, it does, because its date is determined by cycles of the moon. ''I'd always get all these stupid emails, 'You Islamophobe idiot, don't you know that the Muslim calendar...'
He laughs uproariously. ''That's Bob Hope on the Orpheum circuit in 1924. That's my Ramadan vaudeville joke and I'm gonna keep doing it for as long as I live. So I do it for that reason, but I also do it because I think that whoever prowls through the rubble, the ruins of Western civilization, whether it's the Chinese Politburo, or Czar Putin, or the new caliphate, or it's aliens from the planet Zongo, will look at what we had and wonder why we did this to ourselves, and they will roar their heads off laughing. So I figure you might as well laugh now. ... There are certain downfalls of great civilizations that are just hideous and horrible and all the rest of it. But we're doing this to ourselves, and in a blackly comic way, it's hilarious."Exactamundo, Mr. Steyn.
I think a humorist of another era, whose wisdom, sadly, is little remembered these days, got it just right when he observed re the best way to navigate through life's perilous shoals: A little song; a little dance; a little seltzer down your pants.
Words to live by, my friends, especially in this Obama-eat-dog era of ours.
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