Reports are that Kim Jong Il died of a heart attack yesterday. I can’t be sure that Team America played no role in his passing, but I can hope that it did. As I wrote in nominating Fasi Zaka for an Al Copeland Humanitarian Award:
…there is another essential element in the arsenal of liberty — ridicule. Tyrants of all stripes, in addition to being monstrously cruel and evil, are also almost always laughably, pathetically, and outrageously ridiculous.
Charlie Chaplin realized this when he mocked Hitler in The Great Dictator. In Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick portrayed the communist leader as a weepy drunk and the war-mongering general as a paranoid suffering from ED. South Park has portrayed Osama Bin Laden as the slapstick LooneyTunes villain, Wile E. Coyote. The Daily Show and Colbert Report make their living off of puncturing the pomposity of politicians. Humor may not be the best weapon against tyrants, crooks, fools, and all other kinds of politicians, but it is a very important one.
Who knows? Maybe spot-on ridicule weighs heavily on the heart of vicious tyrants.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
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