It is sometimes hard to get your point across when faces with the dogmatic screaming of the right, another comedian is showing us the way; ridicule:
The character in question is Storch Heinar, an anti-Nazi cartoon stork, whose image has appeared more than 5,000 times on anti far-right campaign posters in north-eastern Germany where state elections will be held on Sunday.
Apparently he has an irrational hatred of frogs.
The lampooned NPD is furious. Party workers have made frenzied efforts to rid the region's big cities of stork posters to avoid further ridicule
Nothing quite like a neo-Nazi in a frenzy to make my day.
Storch Heinar boasted afterwards: "The enemy has been destructively defeated."
Sounds a little like Bush if you ask me.
"The far right gets particularly annoyed by humorous initiatives," said Gudrun Heinrich, a political scientist at Rostock university. "Because it doesn't know how to deal with them."
Indeed they really don't know how to handle Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert either.
They tried to fight back with Glenn Beck who was meant to be the right's answer in the "humor race", in the end he came across as a parody of the right itself.
It's funny how many of the right wing blowhards remind me of my Great Uncle Howard who used to pontificate about [insert racial slur of choice; usually the Irish even though he was part Irish but would never admit it] were bringing the country down and rail against the evils of government. Most of all I remember my Great Aunt's Elizabeth's deflation of the hype "stop being quite so silly, we have guests", the rhetoric always came to a grinding halt.
Most of the right wing talk show hosts have become a parody of the right in themselves the trouble is many concur. The only way to stay sane is to ridicule them, and apprently it works; at least in Germany.
Benjamin Weiss, a Rostock hotel owner, grew so irritated by the NPD's xenophobic propaganda in a region that depends heavily on tourism that he joined the "Storch Heinar Division" and organised his own team to put up some 300 stork posters around his hotel. "I am fed up with seeing my guests welcomed to Rostock with slogan such as: 'Tourists welcome – foreigners out,'" he said.
And the result is that the NPD is on the run
The NPD's chances of retaining its north-east seats are considered so narrow it is tough to make an accurate prediction
So humor rather than just being a method to keep our sanity can be an effective weapon against the right, even when dressed as a stork.
;-)