I'm sorry but who at the Oregon Health Authority thought this was a good idea? pic.twitter.com/xXHia14KSg
— Samantha Swindler (@editorswindler) October 27, 2020
No matter how dark and horrible things get, there will always be funny things happening.
The humorlessness of the system will remain a source of humor.
It’s not clear if the Oregon Health Authority official who dressed up in clown makeup to give the coronavirus death toll is so totally out of touch with reality, so whacked out on Prozac, that she thought this was a good idea, or if she is actually hilarious. But it sure is funny.
A video in which Oregon Health Authority officials dressed in costume give COVID-19 information is getting national attention, almost two weeks after it was initially posted.
The reason? A screenshot of the video showing an official in sad clown makeup, reading of the daily virus death toll, tweeted by Oregonian/OregonLive reporter Samantha Swindler, was shared widely on social media.
The story has been covered by Fox News, The Independent, TMZ and others.
Dr. Claire Poché, a public health physician with the Oregon Health Authority, kicked off the Halloween safety video by removing her surgical mask to reveal a full face of clown make-up, somewhat reminiscent of the Joker, one of Batman’s creepiest rivals.
“As of today, there have been 38,160 cases of COVID-19 in Oregon, with 390 new cases being reported today,” Poché said. “Sadly, we also reporting three deaths today, bringing the statewide total for COVID-19 related deaths to 608.”
The optics aren’t ideal, especially as Oregon, like many states, deals with surging coronavirus cases.
Here’s the full video. I recommend watching the whole thing, because it will bring you joy.
It isn’t just the clown woman. Another woman, Shimi Sharief, also an Oregon Health Authority employee, wore some sort of fuzzy animal costume (I think it might be Minccino?) as she gave tips on trick or treat alternatives (because trick or treat is canceled, if you didn’t know).
They kept cutting back and forth to the different women, and every time when Sharief was finished, she would put her mask back on.
The camera stayed on her as she put the mask all the way on. It didn’t cut.
Then it would go to Pochè, and she would take her mask off for her segment.
Truly, this is a work of art. It is hands down the funniest thing I’ve ever seen women do. It’s a whole lot funnier than anything Tim Heidecker ever did, I can tell you that much (except if he was being ironic when he edited the Wikipedia of Ant-Man and the Wasp to say that he had a cameo in the film when he was actually an extra – but I don’t think that was ironic).
Which “reality” is funnier? The one where they are doing this because they think it will bring people joy? Or the one where they’re consciously mocking the entire society?
Does it matter? Are both equally funny? Could they be doing both at once?
Frankly, this is what makes me lean towards believing it is self-aware: they did a full half of the screen with the sign language guy.
They have to be laughing about making the sign language guy half the screen. Don’t they?
You know the answer to that: of course they don’t.
We left earth in February. We are nearing Alpha Centauri.
In this other solar system, it is fully possible that some woman, jacked out of her loop on Prozac, ultra-powered marijuana and condensed carbohydrates, and fatigued to the max from the better part of a year of coronavirus lunacy, would say: “Yeah. Em. Okay, well, yeah. We do have deaf people watching. I think sometimes the interpreter is too small. You know? There’s no reason we can’t make him bigger, to make sure that the deaf can see him.”
That’s now something that is absolutely possible.
And there are only two things I know for sure about women, and those are:
- They do not have any form of self-awareness
- They do not like or understand memes
We are experiencing mass insanity.
We are already fully in it.
Look at this woman’s face:
She is totally gone.
There was a term in the 1960s for someone who took LSD and was never the same again: “acid casualty” (original Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett was probably the most famous case). This coronavirus lunacy is creating casualties. People are starting to break. The paranoia associated with this disease is driving people straight over the edge. They will not come back from this. Even if this hysteria goes away at some point, these people are going to be permanently deranged.
Pochè is a career woman, and she is obese. At one point she says that her boyfriend – who she calls “my fellow clown who lives with me” – didn’t grow up celebrating Halloween, which means he’s either a Moslem or an Indian, probably. So, she’s high risk for losing her marbles.
But it is just going to keep getting worse, and worse, and worse. More and more normal people are going to start going nuts. Even people who don’t go completely nuts are going to start moving closer to the edge. At no point in history has anything even remotely like what we are experiencing right now ever happened – using this electronic media to promote this kind of unhinged paranoia is a nutso experiment in mass psychology, and the goal at this point is obviously to drive people insane.
The number one thing that you need to do is not go insane.
There’s a good chance that when President Trump is reelected, he’s going to switch up some of this virus stuff.