Tag Archives: humor

McMansions are Republican homes?

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In a humor/satire column in the Huffington Post, McMansions are tied to Republicans:

A Pew survey finds President Obama is polling quite well against a “generic” Republican opponent, better than George W. Bush was against a “generic” Democrat in 2003. Forty-seven percent of respondents said they would like to see Obama reelected while 37 percent opted for a generic Republican candidate. HuffPost Hill couldn’t reach “generic” Republican, Pleated Q. Pants IV, at his McMansion in suburban Columbus for comment. We hear he was shopping at a big box store and thinking about national security.

This is an interesting mix of characteristics: the “generic” Republican candidate shops at a big box store (why not say Wal-Mart? Is Target too trendy?) in central Ohio and lives in a suburban McMansion. There may be some truth to some of this: Joel Kotkin argued after the 2010 election that Republicans won the suburban vote even as both parties for fighting for this demographic.

I have seen other cases where McMansions are tied to Republicans. What exactly about the McMansion is Republican: the size? The bad architecture? The sprawl? The suburban lifestyle? The three (or more) car garage? The big mortgage? The wealth that made the house purchase possible?

What would a Democratic characterization in the same vein look like? In terms of the housing unit, how about an urban loft or a refurbished rowhouse or brownstone, all in a gentrified, atmospheric, and trendy neighborhood?

Laughter and fun declines precipitously during the life course

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A study from the University of Glamorgan found that age 52 is when “both men and women begin to suffer a sharp decline in their sense of humour and get increasingly grumpy.”

Also, humor and the laughing drops quite a bit from being an infant to being a teenager and then drops again after having kids:

The study found that while an infant can laugh aloud as many as 300 times every day, life rapidly becomes far less fun.

As Harry Enfield’s Kevin and Perry so deftly depicted, things soon change. While teenagers are the age group most likely to laugh at other people’s misfortunes, they laugh on average just six times a day.

Things get even bleaker in what should be the relatively carefree twenties, when we laugh four times a day.

This rises to five times a day throughout the thirties, when having children is cited as a major factor in restoring a sense of humour.

By the time we reach 50, Brits are laughing just three times a day, while the average 60-year-old manages a hearty guffaw just 2.5 times in the same period.

Just five or less laughs a day throughout all of adulthood? Assuming that this can be somewhat generalizable to Americans, it suggests that we need to laugh more.