THIS IS MEANER than anything Josh Chafetz has written:

If Annie Sprinkle provides one sort of counter-cultural entertainment, The New York Times’s op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd provides another, less sexual but not necessarily less obscene. Dispassionate readers, encountering Dowd’s hysterical outbursts, might be forgiven for wondering if she were quite sane. (They might also, we suppose, wonder about the sanity of her employers.) Dowd was already out of control in the Clinton years, when she first came to prominence. But since George W. Bush took office, she has left mere stridency for a form of editorial hectoring that is partly irresponsible, partly surreal.

Yes, and most damning of all, it just isn’t funny. You needn’t be both funny and profound, a combination reserved for such giants as Mark Twain, Dave Barry, and James Lileks. But if you’re a columnist for the New York Times you ought to be one or the other. At least some of the time.

UPDATE: Juan Gato, on the other hand, is funny.