Why is "Malarkey." funny?

Political

Who it channels

An old-fashioned word for nonsense that now mostly evokes Joe Biden, who revived it.

Where it comes from

"Malarkey" is genuine early-20th-century American slang for empty talk, but Biden used it so often — famously telling Paul Ryan "that's a bunch of malarkey" in the 2012 vice-presidential debate — that it became his.

Why it lands

Said today it does double duty: it calls something nonsense, and it does so in a voice your listener immediately places. It also carries the whiff of a grandfather who says "malarkey" because the truly modern word is unprintable.

How to drop it

"The meeting could have been an email. Pure malarkey."