The UN Human Rights Council has a special rapporteur investigating affordable housing conditions in New York, which is depressing, frankly, unless you are Jonah Goldberg, in which case it is hilarious.

Maybe you've heard of Etsy, the uber-twee site allowing "creative" types to sell their "arts and crafts" "wares." Imagine shopping at Michael's on crack. Regretsy, which finds the most insane things on Etsy, is like shopping Michael's on acid.

Oh, to write jokes for one of those late night TV shows! Seriously, please, let me do that. Those staff writers get paid. But the freelancers get totally screwed!

Doritos had the public submit proposed Super Bowl ads. Here's a concept that didn't win, for some reason: Pretzels have killed idiot President George W. Bush, eat Doritos instead! Ha. That's "not funny."

Virgin is always making those cheeky ads for itself, right? But when a blogger does it in obvious parody style, Virgin sues them. Scrubs.

Wall Street big shots have their own exclusive fratty Friar-like club called "Kappa Beta Phi" that met last week for its annual—and allegedly humorous—to-do. Let us list some of the unfunny jokes that occurred:

Far be it from us to tell somebody not to sell a useless item on eBay for an absurdly high price, but how much is a single joke from an Onion staff writer really worth?

Execs at the National Lampoon are charged with illegally inflating the company's stock price, which leads to a blogger making a predictable joke. Comedy sucks these days. [TheStreet.com]

A "landmark" court ruling in the UK means that it is now legal to make jokes there (without having to pay millions in defamation damages). Jokes about Elton John, especially.

America, as we've learned, has a big PR problem. The rest of the world doesn't like us so much! Our current president is something of a laughingstock, you see, and we have this problem with expecting others to live up to the ideals we espouse as we fail to live up to them ourselves. You can see how that might bug people, right? Thankfully we're done with the Bush administration. Listen to how little Bush is respected by the Russians and French:

While we're over here getting our little heads upset about the pending Obama-inspired CRISIS OF COMEDY, fretting that there's only one extant Black President joke and desperately enlisting comedians to offer advice on humorous lines of attack on our hopey new leader, The Daily Show is going about its business as usual, being funny! Now I just feel dumb. Comedy Central Insider puts this crisis in perspective:

This is a clip from Eddie Murphy's standup special Delirious, recorded in Washington, DC in 1983, back when Eddie Murphy was funny. He is joking about the first black president, who, back then, was going to be Jesse Jackson, but the joke still works. It works so well, in fact, that it is basically the only joke about The First Black President. The L.A. Times sent a reporter out to the comedy clubs this weekend to watch black comedians make their black comedian jokes about Barack Obama, the new black president.

Now that our nation has gone and elected a popular black man with no clear signs of dementia as president, it's obvious that our Crisis Of Comedy is a most vital public issue. Nerdy white comedians have no idea how to make fun of Obama! Never fear. We reached out to Jordan Carlos—professional comedian, Stephen Colbert's black friend, and a guy we once tried to assert (unsuccessfully) would be a better Saturday Night Live Obama impersonator than Fred Armisen—for his take on the future of Obama comedy. Exclusive Jordan Carlos Analytical Comedic Essay Below! Barack: This Dude Even Changed Comedy Tuesday By Jordan Carlos The political balance of power may not have been the only thing that shifted Tuesday. The world of comedy got a bit of a shake up too. Though it's difficult to predict the misty future with any certainty, Obama's win does beg a couple of obvious questions; namely, "Do Black comedians have much to complain about anymore?" Now before you tear my nuts off for asking this, let me say I'm just raising this extreme question for the sake of argument. I don't actually think Black people don't have anything to complain about anymore, though cabs were remarkably easier to come by yesterday in the city. But things have changed—and who are many comedians of color, if not people who point to the old saw of differences between white and Black and all the hi-larious inequalities surrounding those differences? Remove that brand of humor from the mix, and what's left for Black comedians to fall back on? Plenty, of course. The world is full of comedic opportunity. But it will be intriguing to see how audiences will respond when a Black comic moans about the everyday racial politics he or she faces when a Black person holds the highest office in the land. For anyone who can do an impression of Obama, congrats! Your stock just went through the friggin roof! Bush impersonators, report to your local soup kitchen or shanty town. Obama impersonators are guaranteed at least 4 years of career opportunity. For me, a fairer-skinned black dude with newly close-cropped hair and larger-than-average ears, things are looking up. I've already been able to do my impression for TV (once on Headline News and once on a Japanese morning TV show – Yeah, I know. What the F?) and I look forward to at least four more years of it. Though I was asked by the folks at Gawker to give my take on Fred Armisen's impression of Obama, I'm gonna have to pass. Other art forms encourage a lover's quarrel among artists – boisterous roundtables and bustling salons, etc. — comedy, not so much. Take it from me, comics are a sensitive bunch – me more than most (we're not talking Kanye West levels here, but you get where I'm going with this). We want to be liked (obveeez!!!). Did I dance around that enough? You can watch my Obama impression here, OK? [Ed.: And also here] I think the existential question of what comedians can complain about now is shared by not only Black comedians, but also the good folks at The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher. They got what they wanted, right? So now what? Feast on Obama like they did Bush? That would be kinda weird. Recently on his show Bill Maher declared a new rule: that President-elect "Obama must give comedians something to work with." When questioned about this statement by America's favorite old man, Larry King, Maher said, "But look, [Obama]'s going to be the president and we're going to have to get over our nervousness about making fun of a Black person. He's not a black person. He's the president." OK, Maher lost me at the whole, "he's not a black person" bit, but you get what he's trying to say. Eventually ALL comedians are going to have to take off the kid gloves and skewer the newly anointed commander in chief. How they do it will be something that I, for one, am interested to see. To me there's plenty you can make fun of when it comes to Obama: — Because of him the high concept movie about a jazzy black dude being president is dead and over. —People maybe just maybe expect too much from him. —He's got huge, honking ears. —You can make fun of the fact that it's hard to make fun of him. —You kind of have to do a lot of self-deceiving to back the guy (doesn't believe in gay marriage, tough on immigration, tosses friends when they become political liabilities – Rev. Wright, Ayers). —He may kinda owe Oprah a place in his cabinet. —Does Jesse Jackson still want to cut his nuts off like he said? And why the hell was he front-row Chicago victory rally after saying something like that? Obama must have known he said that. Where's my front row seat? I didn't call for castration. You could make sketches out of all that stuff and more if you've got the salt. You should always be able to laugh at your leaders – even if they're awesome people who happen to be Black. Click to view

If you receive an email from the Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America, with the subject line "Your Urgent Help Needed," please be informed that it is not actually from Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. [Angry Bear] (Photo by AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Funny video site Heavy.com managed to make it through the tech boom and bust intact. But the site—and its venture capital investors—may have overestimated how popular it could actually get. We hear that Heavy's VP of marketing has left the company, taking two of his top salesmen with him on the way out. His departing words: "Rome is burning." Not long after getting an infusion of capital in 2006, it was revealed that Heavy was inflating its traffic numbers by buying pop-up ads featuring Heavy content on other sites, and counting them as visits. Which is not something any advertiser wants to hear:

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the premier public intellectual of blindly cheerleading globalization, has been wrong about nearly everything, ever. He is hailed as a foreign policy genius, and of course he was dead wrong on Iraq. He is hailed as a brilliant economist, and maybe he is, but his magical flat global future looks increasingly like the wet dream of a guilty rich liberal who doesn't want to hear about inequality that can't be solved by internet access. His most stunning insights are banal cliches, often attributed to cab drivers in exotic (developing) foreign locales. But we have to hand it to him: his joke about Sarah Palin and oil drilling is pretty funny! It is so funny, in fact, that he delivered it 500 times last week, from Letterman on through the Sunday shows. Let's all congratulate Thomas Friedman on his very first joke! Chant with him: CARBON PAPER CARBON PAPER CARBON PAPER!

Wacky Packages were the Consumerist.com of the 1970s (minus the journalism). They were sold in packs like baseball cards, but each card was some spoof of a consumer product, with Mad Magazine-style humor. Crest Toothpaste? Make that Creep Toothpaste, ha. They are simply mesmerizing. Every product imaginable, from deodorant to tuna fish to magazines, was subject to a vicious, wacky remixing. Now a book telling the Wacky Packages story has come out; making this an opportune time for a 20-part Wacky Packages Gallery Blowout! Click through for 20 of our favorites, which have been helpfully preserved on the internet. Ad criticism this sharp wouldn't be seen again for 30 years:

Poor Maureen Dowd doesn't know how to make fun of Barack Obama. It's actually pretty easy! Everyone misses Bill Clinton because he enjoyed extramarital sex with interns and oddly unattractive women, he had a southern accent, and he was kind of chubby. Everyone will miss George W. Bush because he's stupid. Those traits are so, so easy to mock! But the problem is jokes about those traits were and are and always have been terrible. Have another Big Mac, Bubba! Then put a cigar in someone's vagina! Hey George Bush you look like a chimp! And, like a chimp, your grasp of complex concepts like grammar is often lacking! Jesus. Stop already. Obama's a godsend, because he lacks those easy buttons. So everyone has to be more creative with their humor. Allow us to help you!

One of John McCain's oft-cited attributes is his humor. He says it fortified him as a POW in Vietnam, and who are we to argue with that? It's endeared him to a press corps that can't seem to get enough of his straight talk, especially when it's deep-fried in corniness. The ability to laugh has also blunted the edges of some of McCain's more provocative moments on the stump: The "Bomb Iran" ditty he sang to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" was disturbing, sure. But on the continuum of crazy right-wing uncle behavior, it was more like not knowing when to stop complimenting little Sally on what a finely turned out and healthy young lady she's become, not like shooting the family dog, which Cheney would do before turning the rifle onto the bipeds. McCain's demonstrated a winning way with self-mockery ("Time was I could knock up Cleopatra just by winking at her") and the kind of venom-less satire that's made him the most frequent guest and foil on the Daily Show, as well as the most at-ease pol performer on SNL (remember Steve Forbes as a construction worker?). As against Hillary's robotic attempts at mirth, which only Diane Ladd in a David Lynch film could adequately capture, and Obama's intellectual suavity, which belies his inner law geek, McCain is the knuckle sandwich-giver of this election. And while it's true that voters esteem personality above policy, his humor could well be more of a liability than an asset.