Unsafe at Safeway It was Steve Allen, and later Lenny Bruce, who said that “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” But everything is accelerating. Even the rate of acceleration is accelerating. The time between tragedy and comedy gets shorter and shorter. The more horrible the news is, the more victims there are to involuntarily serve as setups for punchlines. Reality has long been nipping at the heels of comedy, and it finally caught up. Example: On the same day that people were being burned alive in the fire at the Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas, Jay Leno did a joke in his 7onight Show monologue about there being two kinds of cult members there-- “regular and crispy.” Of course, events like the recent madman massacre outside a Safeway supermarket can be challenging. How could made-up humor possibly top the actual absurdity of mass murderer Jared Loughner asking his MySpace friends not to be mad at him. After all, he was merely planning to indiscriminately kill as many innocent human beings as he could, with democracy itself as collateral damage. The night before Loughner committed his senseless slaughter, he had taken photos of himself posing with his gun while wearing a bright HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015331