The person who decided it would be a good idea for Julia Louis-Dreyfus to tell jokes on the culminating evening of the 2020 DNC should be out of a job before Joe Biden wraps up his speech tonight.
There have been high points and low points on each of the other nights this week. But nothing compares to the full-on train wreck of Louis-Dreyfus launching into a one-liner about Donald Trump's tear-gas-infused photo-op outside the White House last June right after a video clip of Biden talking soberly about his Catholic faith and how it got him through the death of his son Beau. If cringing made a sound, its coast-to-coast roar at that moment would have been deafening.
But that wasn't just a single awkward incident. It was one in a series beginning with Louis-Dreyfus' exchange with Andrew Yang in which the pair mocked the name of Vice President Mike Pence like a couple of 12-year-olds and extending on to Borscht Belt quips about Trump's golf score.
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At a normal convention, where jokes could be told before a laughing audience and comedic timing didn't get tripped up by delayed video feeds, it's at least conceivable that it could have worked. But even then it would have been ill-advised. Politics is serious business. It concerns people's lives and well-being. And that's especially true this year, with over 170,000 Americans dead in a pandemic, many millions out of work, and the White House occupied by a ignorant and malicious con artist. Indeed, this has been a consistent message at the convention all week. And Thursday night added in a heavy dose of segments about the many personal tragedies faced by the party's nominee. To try and mix that up with howls of laughter shows stunningly bad judgment.
That the jokes are totally unfunny only makes it worse.
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