When the comedic tension finally grew too much, first bit by bit and then all at once, when our government could finally quit playing around and go back to openly creating one desired group who could do whatever they wanted and another undesired group who must bear everything in silence, when our elected officials, who are surely the brightest and most civic-minded among us, could finally go back to mumbling vague statements and checking if the plain text of the fourth amendment polled well, and when the outlets that claim to monopolize the space of respectable discourse could finally stop mugging to one other as they pretended to be dogged pursuers of the truth and could again equivocate between the plain evidence of our own eyes and the claims of people who have been proven to lie again and again and again, I—one of those unfortunate souls doomed to live life with no sense of humor—totally missed that there had been a joke at all.