Because they didn't think it was funny, or because their mothers didn't make them watch The Sound of Music every year?

Or because laughing at Islam will get you killed?

No one in the audience laughed? Must've missed it because I was laughing too hard. And I don't even care for musicals that much!

Anyone who didn't get that reference has never moved away from the rock they were born under. I'm sure they all got it - I don't know why they didn't laugh. I did.

Confidential to Dan: Consider responding at some length to Dueholm's article? If Lindy West's fat-silliness was worth a lengthy response, this should be too - it's a lot more insightful. (Not knocking Lindy - she's usually a great writer).

I don't get it.

@5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpO07qYC…

Many a thing I know I'd like to tell them, many a thing they ought to understand...

The first time I watched that movie, my parents shut it off after the puppet show scene and told me that the movie ended then, because I was very young and they thought the Nazis might scare me. A year or two later, I watched it again and shat brix, metaphorically speaking, when I saw that the movie had mystically extended itself.
For some time afterwards, I thought it was possible to make a movie run longer by rewinding and replaying the tape. True story.

@9: Actually, our legal system is more derivative of the Code of Hammurabi, you twit.

@8 I want to live in that world.

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

@9 In what universe is Islam bashing a sport for liberals?

but on time for every meal!

I laughed too, then when the audience didnt laugh, I worried I laughed inappropriately.

but wasnt that bit about Obama being in Hawaii as a fetus makes him an american to the prolifers brilliant????

I hate musicals, I'm under 30, and I still got it.

I thought the audience did plenty of laughing. Are you talking about the line, "There are still Muslims"? IMHO the audience missed a beat there because they weren't sure if that was the whole punchline. Blame Jon's genius, not the audience. It was just one of those things that worked better for the camera than the stage. Something about the eyebrows...

Bearing in mind that I can't watch the clip, I *thought* the point of the stewart clip was not "liberal bashing of muslims" but to make fun of King's "muslim insurrection" hearings or whatever that crazy guy is doing in congress.

That all said, I also lol'd at the image dan lifted above. (Read the book, read thru the lyrics.) Ha! Stewart seems to be pretty funny.

Not only did I laugh when I saw it last night, but I've also had that version of the song playing on a loop in my head all morning.

@19: Guess again. While the Justinian code (Corpus Juris Civilis) is the historical-cultural foundation of modern-day civil law systems, it is neither the basis for common law systems (i.e. the legal system/culture of England and its former colonies) nor Islamic law systems.

I'm starting a Graphic Novel about it, with a starring role by the Prophet.

Hey, Mr. Unregistered-- So you've been educated somewhat in historical things. Of course, anyone who writes "Because liberals are too lazy to read anything that isn't condensed into an article and shouted by one of their leaders" is proof that you've wasted a lot of time & money in your education, as it has not taught you how to think.

I was too busy laughing to notice no one else was, too.

@15- YES! The fetus = person = citizen thing was brilliant!

dammit! late again ... what @15 said.

Yeah, that was a weird beat, with the unsure laughter a few seconds after the joke. I read it as the audience missing the joke because it's both funny and true, and their read was more toward the sad observation than laughing at the absurdity of the fact that the sad observation is actually true.

@15: Second!

I actually think that the first unregistered comment is correct, in a sense, assuming the poster is talking about "liberals" in the sense of people today who proclaim Classic Liberalism as an ideology (most of whom only selectively advocate the postulates of Classical Liberalism when it benefits them directly), and not the political ideology that is currently described as Liberal in mainstream culture. Of course, any uninterrogated universalizations like that are problematic, so the statement is still flawed: it would be more accurate to say that liberals (and indeed any ideological group) tend to discount information that contradicts the tenets of their ideologies; that groups identifying as "Conservative", with their wider-spread insistence on narrowly-interpreted, dogmatic religious doctrines, tend to be more guilty of this; and that narrowing the focus to "liberals" as opposed to all ideological groups is a disingenuous framing technique that over-identifies a much more wide-spread tendency with a particular group in order to vilify it.