Letterman beat Conan's Tonight Show in the ratings on Tuesday, but that's been lost in the controversy over a pair of borderline Palin family jokes from Monday night. The "slutty flight attendant" line, though certainly uncalled for, seems to me equivalent to the sorts of things that are said about the Clintons and the Kennedys—uncool, that is to say, but roughly commensurate with the price of fame. The "knocked up by Alex Rodriguez” thing strikes me as significantly worse because celebrity children who are underage or don't seek the spotlight should, I think, be left alone, even in the otherwise unrestrained pursuit of comedy. (I think I'd probably feel differently in Letterman had been in a comedy club or on a college campus somewhere; the Chelseas and Bristols of the world shouldn't have to see themselves mocked on TV.)

The idea currently shooting around the right-wing blogs that this was a joke about raping a fourteen-year-old girl, though, strikes me as a completely hysterical overreaction. There's no remotely charitable reading of the situation that suggests the phrase "her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez" would ever be intended to trigger thoughts of Willow Palin. (To whit: Instapundit.) That it was Willow and not Bristol at the game is certainly bad luck for Dave, and I wouldn't have blamed Sarah Palin for getting in a jibe or two about it, but that fact is not something either the audience or Dave himself can reasonably be believed to have been thinking of. You can call Letterman out for crossing the line without turning things all the way to 11.

A debate McCain can win? Both presidential candidates attended the Al Smith dinner this year, a rare occasion for elites to drop the pretense of real antagonism between pro-corporate plutocrats of different parties, much less the media millionaires who happily transcribe their every lie.

Both candidates were funny, but McCain was really in his element, and won more good will from me in this fifteen-minute segment than anything else he's done in eight years.

Vanity Fair has a clone of the New Yorker cover, this time about John and Cindy McCain and functioning orthogonally to the original. Whereas that was a parody of the right-wing whisper campaign, this is the left-wing whisper campaign, somehow made acceptable (or speakable-in-public) by the controversy over the New Yorker cover. Because it reflects its audience's shared understanding of reality, as opposed to mocking someone else's caricature of it, this cover is significantly nastier than the first, and, I think, even less effective, ranking about as high as a Family Guy let's-remember-together gag on the Laff Meter.

I actually like what Gawker has to say about it:

As you can see, it's like taking the square root of comic failure. Not only is McCain not depicted as a caricature of feverish political imagination (he doesn't look half bad here, really), but there's hardly an exaggerated element in the pic, save perhaps the burning Constitution in the fireplace.

Thursday joke remainders.

* An intellectual was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. "Don’t cry," he consoled them, "I have freed you all in my will." Old jokes.

* And John McCain's problem with old jokes, blogged here the other day, is actually getting some media attention: Ben Smith wrote it up at the Politico this week.

* Ricky Gervais has announced on his This Side of the Truth filming blog that Karl Pilkington has finally agreed to a fourth and presumably final series of The Ricky Gervais Show podcast.