You can tell it's not comedy...if it's in The New Yorker

You know The New Yorker. They used to have well known funny cartoonists. Addams. Day. Lorenz. Weber. Stevenson. Arno. They also had challenging ones: Steig and Steinberg.

Now? Now you're lucky if one in ten cartoons will even make you smile.

They used to have S.J. Perelman and Woody Allen. Now, there's somebody called Mia Mercado who writes "shouts and whispers" humor pieces like THIS thing. Go ahead, see how often you laugh out loud. Or smile. Or even nod your head and think "that was witty."

You might say that this Mia is at least a bit funnier than Mia Farrow, who has a son (by somebody or other) who now writes for The New Yorker, and seems to have a huge staff to do his researching and proofreading and writing for him. All he does his purse his pretty pink lips and pose for pictures. This is the guy who even got his own TV show thanks to Mama Mia pulling strings for him.

If you want a comedy of errors, maybe you can have a bitter chuckle for the way Mia declared that Ronan was, perhaps, the bastard child of Frank Sinatra.

Ha ha ha. Wait. Is that funny? It wasn't to Barbara Sinatra, Frank's widow. It wasn't to Frank's daughters. I'm not sure if Frank Sinatra Jr. was still alive to learn he had a half-brother. If he wasn't, maybe he was rolling in his grave.

Through this farce, Ronan pursed his pretty pink lips and gave a Capote-like reply of "We're all children of Frank Sinatra." Something like that. Something neither funny nor witty. Like The New Yorker's attempts at humor.

This is the hard-hitting reporter who has made a specialty of calling out heterosexual celebrities? As if gays, or people "of color" have never abused a power position via a toxic atmosphere, exclusionary tactics, and bullying?

Why didn't the hard-hitting reporter say: "I am definitely NOT Frank Sinatra's son. It's important to me to know who the hell my father is, and in all honesty, there's no reason I shouldn't tell you."

Woody Allen has lately allowed the possibility that since Mia was not faithful (according to him, if not others), it's possible Ronan isn't his. He added that in that case, why was he paying child support all these years? Not too fair. And not funny.