The nature of humor and the nature of John Pomfret's mistake

Following up on my earlier entry on the Post’s "Women are Dim" piece.  My favorite humor writers at the Post and their friends are eviscerating Charlotte Allen’s piece.   Joel Achenbach links to a hilarious takedown by Catlin Gibson and Rachel Manteuffel.  A sample: "Allen’s most effective argument -- that women’s opinions are meaningless and should not be listened to -- is buttressed beautifully by her inability to support her own arguments, even that one." 

Gene Weingarten doesn’t bother rebutting the piece itself noting "he online world has already done a splendid job of savaging this story, forcing lame-ass explanations from the Outlook editors, who officially contend the piece was funny, or satire, or sumpin’."  He then provides a demonstration of what actual satire looks like.  Happily, Allen herself clarifies "I’m not sure whether I’d characterize the piece as satire, but I’d certainly characterize it as humor: my poking fun at the dumb things my
sex does."

Now, there’s a lot of pieces out their poking fun at both sexes.  I tend to find a lot of that humor outdated and tiresome.  That’s true of the stuff aimed both at women and at men including when it’s done by writers I like.  That said, sometime it’s clever enough to work.

I think to make a point by humor it needs to ring true and/or be clever.  As the aforementioned take down shows, it wasn’t at all clever (as a couple conservatives noted).    So basically the only audience that will find it funny are the people that think it rings true.  (Note that rings true doesn’t equal is true, evil lies can be funny, you just have to work a lot harder).  The more insulting a piece, generally speaking, the higher the threshold for ringing true or being clever. 

The piece as originally pitched, comparing Obama fandom to Beatles fandom, doesn’t excite me but could have worked.  The trouble is the piece that was written, while still "tongue-in-cheek" was far more insulting than it was clever or true.  It objectively failed at humor and hiding behind Allen Q&As and saying "if it insulted people, that was not the intent" doesn’t cut it.  I'm sure it rings true for some people., specifically people that think women do act kinda dim.  Publishing the piece as written is a fairly spectacular lapse of editorial judgment.