And here's a classic joke that works best with the serial comma:

"There are two hard problems in computing: naming things, cache expiration, and off by one errors."

The comma indicates a pause when spoken, and you need that pause in this particular joke.

On the other hand, with the serial comma you get "I would like to thank my mother, Ayn Rand, and God."

True! And it's also very funny. (But a shade less so than the parents sentence.) Maybe our descriptivist/purist friends should start a campaign to bring back the dative.