How not to be witty: As I pointed out yesterday, the Tennessean had an article that had to be carefully parsed to understand that a U.S. congressman from Tennessee was actually taking a stab at humor when he he made an outlandish proposal on the floor of the House of Representatives (and, thus, CSPAN and YouTube, etc.). Today, in a follow-up story regarding a near-universal failure of late-night show hosts and bloggers to catch the sarcasm in the lawmaker’s remarks, the Tennessean buries this mea culpa: “The Tennessean reported on his comments on its Web site, portraying the event without indication of sarcasm. The story was online for approximately three hours Thursday before the newspaper posted a revision.” (Quote from my original post: “Actually, despite the way the article is written, I assume the congressman was using irony. However, I’d like to propose that it be a sin for lawmakers to try and be witty.”)
