Sarah Palin is funny. You want to laugh at her when she says things like “you betcha” or “doggone it” or addresses the government as though speaking to an invisible deity: “Hey Government, you’re not always the solution.”

And it would be so easy if we could see her as just that: as a backwards hockey mom who just doesn’t get it, who is portrayed perfectly by Tina Fey and is the laughingstock of the country for not knowing what she reads (or perhaps for not reading at all). We want to laugh at her “Me and Todd”s, her Miss America-esque remarks, her hair-sprayed updos, her frilly, shiny suits and her glasses. We can even laugh and say she’s hot. She is a public personality, and her antics rival those of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan; the covers of supermarket tabloids even suggest extramarital affairs.

Last Thursday, I went to an on-campus watch party and saw her debate Joe Biden. The room erupted in laughter several times—hearty belly laughs, perhaps tinged by frustration, but primarily amused and condescending. People played Sarah Palin Bingo, marking off squares when she made a particularly characteristic remark. It was funny.

But if Sarah Palin is funny, she’s funny in a tragic sense. I left that room with a real sense of sadness, with a fear for the patent instability of American politics. I left that room shaking my head, feeling a combination of unrelenting pity and inane anger. To me, Sarah Palin is pathetic, not because of who she is, but because of where she has been put. I remembered, as I left that room, how strongly the press reacted after Sarah Palin became McCain’s nominee; I remembered thinking that she, as a woman, a governor of a rural state, and a newcomer, was, on paper, a perfect balance to the McCain ticket if he wished to mobilize the conservative Christian base of the Republican Party.

I remembered the speech she gave at the Republican national convention. It was crafted perfectly, pegging her simultaneously as a conservative and an innovator, as a supporter of American values and an opponent of governmental hierarchy. The speech, and the placement of the woman giving it, were political genius.

I say “placement” because I want to convey here that Sarah Palin is not a bad person. She is a puppet. Her gender and the cultural moment at which she chose to become involved in politics set her up to be snapped up by the Republican party, to be fed a carefully crafted message to be regurgitated.

If we think she’s funny, it’s because she so obviously does not belong where she is. To the room of debate-watchers where I sat, she was a joke—someone who cannot understand the private university, liberal, educated, white-collar values that we take for granted because she is from somewhere so fundamentally different from where most of us are from. If she does not read, or is ashamed to admit what she does read, it is perhaps because she is a product of a rural culture, the product of rural public schools and of moose hunting. She is a capable woman placed in a context completely different from that in which she has lived her entire life, a context where she stumbles over her words and looks stupid. She does not realize how out of place she is, and that is where she becomes tragic; that is where I begin to pity her.