The anecdote would only be disturbing and macabre if it just involved Mao rather than both funny *and* if anything even more disturbing and macabre with both of them in it.

Also his quite distinctive central european accent is I suspect something you’re really supposed to be mentally applying to the “We will have to study it” line to get the full blackly comic effect.

It a deeply dark variety of absurdist funny certainly. Think Dr. Strangelove and the closing ‘mineshaft gap’ scene.

I thought it was interesting and on topic for a sex blog because the idea of treating a country’s women as an exportable assent on such a grand scale has resonances with issues of modern concern, such as sex worker migration, the “mail order bride” phenomenon, and the ugly patterns of modern pimpery that entangle a subset of the migrant sex worker population.

The only thing that strikes me as funny about this is Kissenger’s famously phlegmetic disposition — if his face showed any sort of surprise, it would have been a miracle of the age, and yet, this might have gotten under his defenses. We’ll never know.

My only contribution to the humor of it — obviously pretty lame — was the headline, designed to suggest that the women were offered to Kissenger personally, as some sort of enormous harem. Now, if that had happened, it would be funny.

Or maybe I’m just not seeing the funny. It is something about Kissinger? I’m not terribly well-acquainted with him or his standing in the common consciousness, so perhaps there’s an element I’m missing.