HAPPINESS: "Hello, sunshine," the songwriter said!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2026

A brilliant comedian's duty: Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world?   

That was the start to a pop music hit which went to #1 on the Billboard Hot Country charts. For what it's worth, those lyrics may not be all that different from Thoreau's reported experience.  

Describing his time by the shore of Walden Pond, the sacred being said this at the start of the chapter called Solitude:   

Solitude

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath...   

Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world? Not quite the same thing, but close. 

That said, the country hit was the farthest thing from a report about solitude. It was written and performed by Donna Fargo, just another Pacific-10 great.   

(The leading authority speaks: "Fargo attended High Point College in North Carolina, then earned a degree at the University of Southern California. After graduating from USC, she became a teacher at Northview High School in Covina, California, eventually progressing to head of the English Department.)

In the song which opens that way, Fargo's subject was happiness, the focus of very few songs. We think it's a beautifully written song—possibly, part of a broader anthem for this struggling nation's future.   

She wrote a song about being happy! Inside the song, its second start goes exactly like this: 

Good mornin', mornin'.
Hello, sunshine.
Wake up, sleepyhead...   

It's a song about waking up to the instant joy of the day. That's something we Americans rarely do in the troubled, desperately threatened nation in which we all reside at the present time. 

Meanwhile, how have millions of us been sent off to bed each night? With the gruesome cretin of the Fox News Channel polluting the American air in this familiar way:   

GUTFELD (10/14/26): Mayor Mamdani announced that he will end carriages drawn by horses in New York City.  

"I guess I can go back to acting," said one woman.   

PHOTO: Sarah Jessica Parker  

AUDIENCE: [Mixed reaction]

GUTFELD: I don't get that joke. 

I don't get it.   

"I don't get it," the creepy man said. It was one of his standard evasions.

Here at this site, we did. 

This creepy man can't stop himself from this nightly behavior. Last night, his insult to the horse named Sarah Jessica Parker was followed by a joke about Governor Hochul's allegedly frozen eyebrows.

Normally, that theme is reserved for Nancy Pelosi. Inevitably, he then offered this:   

GUTFELD: Security video has people doubting Kelly Clarkson's version of shopkeepers refusing to sell her an expensive mechanical bird. 

She claimed that they treated her like the Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman, but no one believes that anyone would pay her for sex. 

In the end, this is all this little mutt has. He had opened with this mandated obsession:

GUTFELD: Good evening, everyone. Hillary Clinton is launching a podcast. It's being co-hosted by Kara Swisher. That's right, and Bill already suggested a title for it:  

"The Only Two Women I Wouldn't Bang."

That's what this little mutt said. Included in his three-minute opening was a joke on the (standard) theme that Kamala Harris is a hopeless drunk, followed by a joke on the theme that AOC is blindingly stupid.  

(To power his insult of AOC, the little mutt pretended that she had made a dumb remark in which Alaska wasn't part of the United States. She has made no such remark. His premise had been invented.)   

This garbage can rolls out every night on its "cable news" channel. Kat Timpf, the New York Times' idea of a feminist, is reliably willing to sit there, say nothing and watch.

Meanwhile, the sitting president behaves in the increasingly disordered ways which get disappeared on this "cable news" channel, and which are frequently avoided by the New York Times itself. But also, in one way, by Bill Maher, as we've been noting this week. 

We don't agree with all his views, but we're huge admirers of Bill around here. What he does isn't hard. What he does is impossible.

We're in awe of Bill's achievement. But at one point, Bill offered this thought about why the sitting president does some of the things he does:

 "I don’t know and I can’t answer and it’s not my place to answer.” 

No one admires Bill's achievement any more than we do. Way back in December 1983, he taught us what to do when the light bulbs in a comedy club's condo have all somehow burned out.

(You don't go out and buy light bulbs yourself. You get the owner on the phone and make her bring light bulbs over!)

Bill taught us that—the first rule of comedy we would know. (The second rule of comedy we were taught: Always eat the free food!)

Bill taught us the light bulb rule! But does he have a citizen's duty? 

Tomorrow, we're going to suggest that he does. But what does that have to do with happiness?  

We may even get to that.

Tomorrow: "No people are uninteresting."