It’s from Charles Pierce, on a conservative wish list for a presidential candidate.
Authenticity is the key. Once you’ve learned to fake that, the rest is gravy.
Whew. I’m putting down the keyboard and picking up the red pen to concentrate on grading.
Various forms of that gag have been in circulation for over fifty years!
Because true authenticity is just too much of a stretch for conservatives. Why don’t we just say that truth is too much of a stretch for them and call it a day?
One I’ve seen:
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.
— Jean Giraudoux
I don’t have a source or date for the quote but Giraudoux unfortunately died in 1944.
You learn something every day…
From wiki (sorry about that):
Another quote often misattributed to Giraudoux is, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.” A version of the saying was ascribed to Giraudoux in Murphy’s Law Book Two by Arthur Bloch published in 1980. But actor George Burns also put it in his own 1980 memoir. The joke has been traced to a 1962 newspaper column by Leonard Lyons, in which actress Celeste Holm quotes an unnamed actor saying, “Honesty. That’s the thing in the theater today. Honesty… and just as soon as I can learn to fake that, I’ll have it made.”
Mmm, gravy.
(Somewhere in the South of the USA, I saw in a convenience store a biscuits-and-gravy stand. The biscuits were in a warming oven, and the gravy was in a heated urn with a pump spout. I stood looking at that gravy dispenser, thinking that it was the most American thing I had ever seen.)
That’s so good it could have been written by Milo Yiannopolous’ writer-room.
I was once involved in an event that was being photographed for a marketing promotion. And I heard the immortal line:
“Let’s rehearse that a few more times so it looks spontaneous.”
johnson catman @2
Reminds me of my supervisor who said, “Let’s make it look like we are doing the right thing.” The obvious response being, or we could just do the right thing . . . .
I’m sure I’ve heard Groucho Marx make this joke.
Not untrue though, at my most authentic I’m often asked why I have to pretend all the time.
The mildly deranged penguin points out that, as usual, the long pigs have it all backwards. It’s “It looks better when you fake it”, or simply “Reality is boring”.
These critters might be better at faking it.
In fact, I would look forward to seeing one of them in the Republican primaries.
“Despite their small brains—ravens are just as clever as chimps” http://phys.org/news/2016-04-small-brainsravens-clever-chimps.html
Bob Monkhouse said something similar…
“The secret of success in show business is sincerity…… Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
I heard it attributed to Richard Nixon. “The key thing is honesty and sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” No doubt the attribution was a slander. REALLY it came from Donald Trump.