RENEWING THE CHALLENGE (via David Hill, The Bronx):

A Right-Wing Lenny Bruce (ALICIA COLON, 6/04/04, The New York Sun)

When it comes to politics, conservatives are just funnier than liberals, who take issues much too seriously and political correctness to the nth degree.

Still, the idea of conservative standup is a rarity, and when I met Julia Gorin, a conservative comedienne, last month at the Ball for Life, I was intrigued by her choice of profession. What was even more surprising to learn is that there are more where she came from. [...]

Because New York is not necessarily the breeding ground for conservatives, I first thought that Ms. Gorin was from the Midwest or some other red state. Surprise, surprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say. Ms. Gorin was born in Moscow.

Her father, Edward Gorin, a violinist with the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, was expelled as a dissident when she was only a few months old.

He had planned to get his family out of the Soviet Union to join him in Israel, but after watching armed guards outside the playgrounds in Jerusalem, he decided that that wasn’t how he wanted his children to live.

Israel did have not diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, so he emigrated to America and took a job with the symphony in Baltimore, where Julia spent her childhood. She was 3 when she was reunited with her father, thanks to the intervention of a Democratic Senator, Charles Mathias, who secured their release after meeting with Leonid Brezhnev.

Ms. Gorin thinks that if the senator had known how conservative she’d turn out to be, he would have left her in Moscow.

She says that about 90% of the original waves of refuseniks in the ’70s and ’80s were natural Republicans.They had witnessed the results of left-wing policies and rejected them. “The only people who weren’t Republican were college professors and welfare recipients,” she said.

I laughed at this, but Ms. Gorin said, “I’m not kidding.”

With a pile of books just waiting to be given away, now seems as good a time as any to renew our challenge: it is our position that all humor is conservative; we'll give a book to the first successful exception.

N.B.: Last time we did this it was claimed with some fervor that, for instance, Dr, Strangelove is a liberal movie, just because that was its intent: nonsense.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2004 7:58 AM