We all remember the twenty-second and the final episode of the seventeenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons.
Simpsons jokes have of course usually been sharp and carefully crafted, and never too easy, but I don’t recall anything as perfect as the Duff blimp crashing on the baseball field and, thinking his wife is aboard, the Kris Benson character cries out, ‘This is the worst blimp crash ever!’
A millisecond after it takes your mind (well, my mind) to assemble the image of the burning Hindenberg, old Abe Simpson shouts from the stands: ‘Too soon!’
Just as you ask yourself, ‘Am I laughing at the Hindenberg?’ you realize the gag is about you even asking the question. Not a joke skirting around tragedy, which is easy, but a joke about the way we feel about jokes about tragedy. On the one hand it mocks the hubris and humorlessness of those who mine grief for agenda advancement, on the other it pokes at those whose laughter burns hottest at the point just beyond too far.
That explains Appeal to Pity.
According to the SPARK-Interfax system, Businessgroup LLC, which publishes the Kyiv Post and is 60% owned by Adnan Kivan (another 40% is owned by Kivan’s partner in a number of other projects, Olha Pavlova), the publication in 2019 received UAH 6.649 million in losses, and in 2020 increased the loss by 64.2% — up to UAH 10.914 million. If in 2019 the company received income from operating activities in the amount of UAH 5.682 million, then in 2020 the loss from this activity amounted to UAH 10.914 million.
Adnan remarked the other day that he is a self-sufficient person and a ‘believer.’ He added, “Investments in media are investments that are pleasing to God.”
( to be continued )
Buck (Kris Benson character): I'm whacking this for you, baby!Announcer: And he sends one into the slug-o-sphere. It going, going... (AIR HISSING)This is the worst blimp crash ever!TOO SOON!
