The Monica scandal was one of the low points in American politics (so far). Not because of what happened in the Oval Office (blowjobs are why you become the President), but because of everyone's ridiculous fake anger over the thing, and the fact that we let that pasty little greaseball Ken Star go on TV at all (TV should only be for good-looking people). Don't even get me started on Linda Tripp.
The whole scandal was, of course, deeply fertile ground for comedy. Oh, and farm it we did. Every single American over the age of 20 has made a cigar joke at some point or another (it's a proven fact). In 1998 Leno did more than 410 hours of cigar and blue dress jokes on Tonight Show monologues, which is incredible when you consider that each monologue is nine minutes, and only 230 of them were filmed that year. We beat this horse to death, then kept beating it and beating it and beating it, going way too far even though the horse bit a lot and totally deserved it. The horse was buried in a shallow grave around 2005, but was dug up the moment Hillary Clinton announced that she would be campaigning hard for John McCain in the 2006-2008 Presidential campaign. The time that this joke/horse/overdone-clilche-metaphor spent in the ground, though, did not freshen it up at all. It just rotted down there. It is time, my fellow Americans (and some Canadians), that we let this joke topic go completely. Yes, the President of the United States of America got his knob polished in the Oval Office by a sort of chubby White House intern. He put a cigar in her vagina and spooged on her dress. It was possibly the greatest thing to happen to late-night television since the Beatles elicited a wave of female orgasm that rolled out of Ed Sullivan's studio and across all of America in 1963.
It is time now, though, for mourning, because this joke is officially dead.
