How does an Argentine commit suicide? By jumping off his own ego.

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It’s somewhat of a funny feeling to be sitting in the Miami Airport and suddenly hear via slightly-too-cheery airport news reporters that a United States governor has been caught having inappropriate relations in a country to which you have just visited. Not to be too obvious, but I’m talking about South Carolina governor Mark Sanford in Buenos Aires. The whole ordeal has led to a number of jokes, including one which compares his current situation with his wife to ‘Jon and Kate politics’. It’s sad because I saw him in an interview on the Colbert Report in 2008 and he seemed pretty nice. (That actually has stemmed another joke, because in the interview Stephen Colbert portrays Gov. Sanford as the most boring guy in the world and accuses the governor of doing some shady business such as having fiery love affairs).

There’s a movie quote which says that everyone’s lives are like tense, unfunny versions of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn't last 22 minutes; it lasts forever. Though it’s obviously an ironic exaggeration to make a joke out of the tedious routines of life, I think that people need humor to make those Ray Romano things of life seem easier. More often than not, when high profile political figures get into trouble, the result is an array of humorous public response. People like the outrageous misfortunes of the popular that makes the things that go wrong in their life appear tolerable. So it’s been pretty interesting to experience some political humor in South America.

When reading Buenos Aires’ newspaper, Clarin, I stumbled upon a humorous piece on Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo. The piece encompassed a variety of jokes that have been spreading about President Lugo’s current predicament with his potential offspring through a number of women. On new popular cumbia song proclaims that “Lugo has heart, but it did not use a condom”. “The stallion of Paraguay”, “Superpapá”, and “Papa of all the Paraguayans” are all examples of graffiti that can be found on walls. Even a humorous play is being produced to poke fun at the president. Other humorous finds included Bill Clinton’s “Noche de Soltero”, in which he supposedly went to a strip club and had a busty stripper do a dance for him and others (Do I even need to articulate the jokes for that one?). I also saw several politically humorous graffiti on the streets, including a child-like painting of a Hello Kitty picture, replaced with the words ‘Hello Kirshner’. With virtually every scandal a number of harsh jokes will inevitably follow, so I would like to offer one piece of advice to any people in power who may magically stumble upon this blog: Stop cheating, stealing, and killing. You will get caught, because everyone is watching you, and it will suck. Learn from the mistakes of countless of your predecessors before you. That is all.

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Photos

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Who knows? Maybe this is where governor Sanford took his Argentine lover.