Play It Again, Kam

 

Just having a little fun, but here’s where I’m going with this: I watched Vice President Kamala Harris’s first speech after President Joe Biden bowed out of the November election race and endorsed her in her bid to become his successor. Harris talked about her experience as a prosecutor and allowed as how she had seen Donald Trump’s type before. Later, she used the same line about Trump’s type in Pennsylvania, where she introduced her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Walz delivered a spellbinding address with many memorable moments, including the Minnesota Golden Rule: Mind Your Own Damn Business, challenging the Republicans to stay away from regulating women’s healthcare. He repeated that line, and many other offerings from his earlier speech, at a rally the next day. The speech was almost identical

At first, I thought, “Hey guys, you did that bit yesterday!’ And then I said to myself, calm down, you’re being too tough a room! This is an election campaign, in which candidates will travel to many different places and will deliver basically the same speech over and over again, perhaps with a couple of adjustments to respond to current campaign developments.

Stump speeches, as they are called, are fixtures of American politics. In the old days, before continuous live media coverage, this worked, because the folks in Cleveland obviously had not heard what was said earlier in Peoria.

Then I thought, we don’t complain about comedians doing the same show while touring the country, as long as we see them when they arrive in our city or on TV. And if Taylor Swift wants to introduce new songs, that’s fine, but the audiences also want to sing along with the old ones. No complaints about repetition there either.

It reminds me of a really old story about the banquet show at a comedians’ convention. Everyone in the audience knew everyone else’s jokes, so it was decided to assign a number to each joke to save time. A comic on stage simply said 3, and there were gales of laughter. Then he called out 10, and got the same response. Finally, he  tried 12. Nothing. Since all the people there were colleagues, he asked them from the stage, “What’s wrong? That wasn’t funny?” Someone in the audience stood up and said, “That wasn’t it, it was your delivery.”

But hey, it’s not like Harris’s opponent in November never repeated HIMself, right? It’s election season, so let’s just roll with it.