That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

But that Joke isn't funny anymore,

No, it's too close to home,

and it's too near the bone, 

after all...

-The Smiths

I admit, I got a few chuckles out of this, but frankly it was low hanging fruit.  Comedy is normally the result of taking some little quirk and exaggerating it, like Jon Stewart aping George W. Bush and his manner of squinting and his peculiar little chuckle.  But in those days, Stewart would often have to actually also exaggerate the content of what was said as well.  SNL hardly had to do that, and I'll be fair, they didn't really have to reach very far to skewer Hillary's smugness as she contentedly watched Trump hoist himself by his own petards.
The problem is this is about who we are going to call our leader for the next four years.  In our system of government, each branch, including the executive is limited in its ability to wreck our ship of state.  It's a good idea, but in these days, where image and perception are so important to actually creating reality, the public face of your commander in chief does matter.
If you peer behind the veil a little bit, you might find some Trump supporters who think that all these gaffs and other crass behavior are just some sort of ploy, or maybe just a series of poorly thought out mistakes, rather than who he is in the real world. Except, because he has been such a public figure for so long, we know that his record of being a boor goes back quite a ways.  We also know that he shows a sociopathic lack of humility, an allergy to facts, and apparently considers diplomacy and compromise to be signs of weakness.
Hillary's track record is that of a politician, and yes that means she's left some destruction in her wake.  Yes, that means she may have voted one way one time and another way another time.  It may mean that she has learned to dissemble and deflect with a preternatural skill that almost makes her seem like an automaton...
Funny right?
I don't know.  I'm not really laughing, and believe me, I'm enough of a cynic that I can usually laugh through quite a lot.
Right now I'm feeling like my cynicism, and maybe the cynicism of our very nation has risen up to bite us.  How did we get to the place where it's actually hard to tell the difference between a debate and a late night sketch comedy routine?  Have we smirked our way into a catastrophe?
Only time will tell.