YOU STAY CLASSY: Yes, Merrick Garland Found ‘Hilarious’ a Song About ‘Rapes for Sale.’

I was surprised and, I admit, incredulous to run across this recent Breitbart article reporting that Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland, as a college student, wrote a review of the musical The Fantasticks in which he labeled “hilarious” a song that (in his words) “provides a shopping list of rapes for sale (e.g. ‘the military rape—it’s done with drums and a great brass band.’).” But the Breitbart account turns out to be accurate. (Here is Garland’s article from the Harvard Crimson’s archives.)

I have no interest in defending Garland’s observation from his college days nearly fifty years ago,* but I will try to put it in some context. What a theatrical performance can make amusing is often difficult to fathom in the abstract, as Mel Brooks’s The Producers, involving a musical comedy about Hitler, demonstrates. I will note that The Fantasticks (according to this Wikipedia entry) ran, on and off Broadway, for 42 years (from 1960 to 2002), “making it the world’s longest-running musical.” So it would seem that many folks shared Garland’s enjoyment of the song.

I’m so old, I can remember 2018, when this news would have been played in a loop by the DNC-MSM.