Lead with a joke. This refrain is as familiar as “Hey Jude” to the speechwriters and bloggers out there. But you know what? Call me a conscientious objector because I refuse to participate in these set up and punch line times. While Slate has declared atheism to be America's last taboo, I have actually found my social life is more hampered by my inability to deliver a joke if you spotted me Raquel Welch, the pope and a lifeboat than it is by my unwillingness to follow the religious precepts set down by Bronze Age goat herders.

Where once we looked to our leaders to guide us, we now expect only to be entertained. To get elected, our politicians must bow before and kiss the ring of the court jester, as Sarah Palin did with her doppelganger Tina Fey on SNL or Michael Steele with his puppet on “The Daily Show”. Being a good sport is now more valued than forming a cogent thought in the political realm.

Even election to the highest office in the land does not stop the pandering, whether it is Barack Obama riffing about bowling like a Special Olympian to Jay Leno on the Tonight Show or that Master of Improv George W. Bush hilariously looking for weapons of mass destruction under the oval office desk.  As long as you avoid that cardinal sin of taking yourself too seriously, you can bomb whatever Middle Eastern nation you want back into the stone age and still get re-elected.

As children, crossing your fingers meant you did not mean what you were saying. But as adults, all we require is the assurance that you were “only joking" as Tracy Morgan proved last summer. You can be a major television star today, tell an audience you would stab your gay son to death then have your boss write a two-part apologia that watered down your original remarks and made gays seem like hypersensitive drama queens in the process.  Great work if you can get it but since our elected officials are now more concerned with showing they can take a joke than create a job, you’re probably going to stay f**ked for a while.

Is it any coincidence that the world's fastest growing nations are also the ones least associated with levity?  India’s most popular comedian Aziz Ansari hails from South Carolina while China has but one lone comedy club to entertain its 1.3 billion citizens.  While Indians celebrate their technological innovators, we demonize ours for being "bone-achingly boring" like Mark Zuckerberg's much maligned SNL appearance, which left one prominent blogger begging for a shot of cyanide after a mere 30 seconds of Zuckerberg screen time.   No wonder Indians get Infosys while we get over 13 million people watching “Rob”.

Americans once led the world in architectural marvels like the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building. But today it is Middle Eastern nations like Dubai who dare to pierce the heavens with their 2,700 foot Burj Khalifa skyscraper while we Americans build statues to sitcom characters.

While Egyptian women courageously protest police brutality, their  sisters here in the United States are too busy tweeting about their desire to get beat by Chris Brown and transforming a movie about Bridesmaids who shit in sinks  into a feminist cause  to give a damn.

If America were as serious as these countries, perhaps we would be experiencing a sixteen percent annual GDP growth rate as well. But alas, we have instead chosen to become the Monty Python version of Camelot: a silly place whose rate of growth lags behind even that of Cameroon.