Cherniak the April Fool
I’m not normally one for April Fool jokes. The good ones take a long and involved amount of time to set up and execute, and I’ve never had the patience for that sort of thing. As well, the best April Fool’s jokes need some sort of datum to indicate that, yes, it was a prank in jest.
Take Warren Kinsella’s blogpost, for example. The giveaway is that penultimate paragraph where he starts sounding off like a stereotypical politician. And of course the commentary reflects that people got the “message.”
Jason Cherniak’s post, on the other hand, is a pretty bad joke:
That’s it. I’m sick and tired of all the BS. Nobody will listen to me and I’m wasting my time. This blog is done. Good luck Liberals.
I won’t be deleting the blog, because after 6 months only the bad stuff would be left on google.
What’s intriguing about all this is that Jason has apparently disabled the comments function on his blog. And that means all of the blog comments are now gone, which suggests that this is meant to be taken seriously. Not something you might to as a funny joke, more like something done as a prank.
Now I think I’d better make a distinction here: there is a difference between a joke and a prank, in that jokes are meant to provoke laughter and pranks are meant to humiliate their target. Kate McMillan’s bamboozling of Kinsella on the “Holocaust prisoner” thing was a prank, not a joke.
If this stunt is meant as a prank, then the targets are obviously all of his detractors, who’ve been on his back for all the hoops he’s had to jump and all the rhetorical twists and turns he’s had to make in order to defend the Liberal Party of Canada in general and Stephane Dion in particular.
Now, whether this “prank” is successful depend on two factors: (a) the number of bloggers who start doing the rhetorical equivalent of dancing on his blog’s grave, and (b) the circumstances under which he resumes posting. For myself, I wouldn’t write any sort of eulogy for “Cherniak on Politics” until the blog’s been inactive for at least a month. To be an April Fool, by definition, isn’t necessarily confined to a single day.
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April 1st, 2008 at 10:03
I agree that this was a lousy joke. It sort of speaks volumes about Jason and Warren. Warren is clearly the more creative one, while Jason merely writes what a lot of reasonable people have been expecting him to do anyway sooner or later, April Fools or no April Fools.
The real “joke” behind this “joke” might be that Jason is actually serious, seeing how the leader he’s worshipped is destroying himself and his party …
April 1st, 2008 at 11:50
Wow! Talk about your over reactions.
It was funny for Pete’s sake. He’s pretending that he (OF ALL PEOPLE!!!) is sick of partisanship and the fact that “no one will listen to him” and is getting out of the game altogether (despite the fact that he’s uber-partisan, thinks people who don’t listen to him are idiots, and wouldn’t leave partisan politics if you set his hair on fire.
“No one listens to me!”… “Good luck Liberals!”… he’s making fun of HIMSELF here, not his readers. He’s putting on the persona of railing against the establishment and becoming frustrated with his party (when he kinda IS the establishment, and would require Stephane Dion to slaughter kittens on national television to give up on the Liberals).
It shows just how much some people dislike Cherniak I suppose that he could do an ironic, self-deprecating April Fool’s post and actually get slagged for it.
Unless this post in an April Fool’s post too, in which case, good on you.
Ya got me!
April 1st, 2008 at 11:52
Oh,
And I’m sure he just disabled the comments on the post to keep the joke going. It’s not much of an April Fool’s joke if your very first commenter reminds everyone that today is April 1st.
April 1st, 2008 at 14:13
I’m not sure how it’s funny. It’s not a typical or clever April Fool’s joke.
Kinsella’s was funny. the National Newswatch/CTV Dryden quitting and becoming the new Leafs’ GM was funny. Cherniak’s “prank” is just odd.
Cherniak has threatened to hang up his blog for good in the past but he always diligently continues on, no matter how many people show him how foolish some of his postings are and how wrong he is or how many times he’s been misled by “sources”.
Is he trying to gauge his popularity or importance with this stunt?
Is he acting like a kid who threatens to run away from home then hides under the bed or in the closet to gauge the reaction of his family to see if anyone misses him or goes looking for him?
Is he just the unfunny guy everybody knows who tries to be funny, but just isn’t?