Wall Street Journal column mocks Kamala Harris' 'face-plant' Naval Academy commencement speech

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A Wall Street Journal columnist mocked Vice President Kamala Harris' Friday commencement speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in a piece centering on the "face-plant" joke she told about solar panels. 

Editor-at-large and Fox News contributor Gerry Baker referred Monday to Harris' speech as "one of the worst 2021 commencement speeches," and provided what he jokingly pictured was the process her staff went through to write the one-liner that appeared to go over with a thud. 

"Just ask any Marine today, would she rather carry 20 pounds of batteries or a rolled-up solar panel, and I am positive she will tell you a solar panel—and so would he," Harris quipped at the commencement to a near silent response, with the exception of her own well-known laugh.

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"Have you heard the one about the Marine with the rolled-up solar panel?" Baker wrote, before saying Harris' attempt at humor "wasn't exactly Bob Hope and the USO." 

"The rest of the audience looked like they wanted to crawl under the nearest solar panel," he jokingly added. 

Baker wrote, to be fair to Harris, it isn't easy to make "culturally compliant" humor, and that the best humor is countercultural and even offensive. "You can't be woke and funny," he said. 

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He illustrated a scene showing how he imagined Harris' staff came up with the one-liner while writing her speech, describing staffers unfamiliar with the target audience of newly commissioned Navy and Marine Corps officers attempting to include something relevant to them, but not "unbelievably offensive." 

One imaginary staffer suggested references to battles like Montezuma or Tripoli, to which another responded it would offend "LatinX and Africans." 

"How about a gag that combines a reference to our passionate commitment to green energy with an emphasis on full gender equality?" another imaginary staffer suggested. 

"Awesome. I’ll get on it," Baker pictured they would have said. 

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"Ms. Harris’s face-plant was no better than her boss’s a week earlier, during his address to the Coast Guard Academy. At least Ms. Harris didn’t try to break the awkward silences after the failed jokes by telling the audience they were ‘really dull,’ as Mr. Biden did," he said.