The New Yorker:

A suggestive tennis match, a manic “Hot Ones” interview, and other amusing moments in an often surreal year.

By Ian Crouch

good joke doesn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. It exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before it. And so it’s worth considering the mood on July 15th, the day that Donald Trump, ahead in the polls against a diminished Joe Biden, announced J. D. Vance as his running mate. Many folks were eager for Vance to make a false step and were in need of a laugh. So it was that the X user @rickrudescalves found an especially receptive audience for a plainly false, but squint-and-it-could-be-true tweet:

can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).

Days later, Biden had dropped out of the race, Kamala was “brat,” Vance had fornicated with a couch, and, for very online Democrats, anything seemed suddenly possible.

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