We have a problem with pounds in this country.
And I ain't talkin' spare tires, muffin tops, beer bellies or thunder thighs.
I'll "weigh in" shortly with a clarification.
Comedy, at least comedy as defined for our chit chat as the utterances of those who list "comedian" where any given form asks for an "occupation", had a pretty stressful week.
First, there was the photographic falderall of Kathy Griffin and the severed head. Not to be confused with any aspiring satanic leaning, grunge soaked, death metal garage band that might coincidentally be named Kathy Griffin and the Severed Head.
Then, Friday night on his live HBO show, Real Time, Bill Maher's medulla took a smoke break and left him alone just long enough for him to wander into the traffic of tastelessness and tell his guest he wouldn't be "working in the fields, because he was a house n***er."
By the way, not for nothin', but, boy, don't I wish that I had bought mucho stock in whatever companies manufacture asterisks. I would have leapfrogged right up to the tippy top of the tax brackets, by now, fer sure.
The "reaction" to Griffin's head and Maher's "ass"terisk (see what I did there?) was, if absolutely nothing else in existence, predictable.
Cries of outrage, calls for arrest and/or firing, depending, and the standard issue variety of flailing, wailing, hand wringing and threats of neck wringing that operate these days on a schedule so precise that they have become the envy of every single rapid transit authority from sea to shining sea.
Okay, let's amuse ourselves for a few minutes by wandering down that road, the riskiness of which I always enjoy reveling in, a little slippery slope I like to call "perspective."
First, controversy and comedy have been together longer than A has been with T and T. And we're not necessarily talking about intentionally comic provocateurs like Lenny Bruce or Andrew Dice Clay or Sean Hannity.
As far back as 1964 (I know, it doesn't seem like far back to me and my peeps, but, to the hip and groovy of today, it's practically Jurassic Park), comic Jackie Mason made hot water headlines by supposedly responding to TV host Ed Sullivan's off camera"two minutes to go" finger gesture with an on air gesture of his own. Hard as it might be to imagine, in those days, even the hint of that defining digit on air was considered a complete and absolute violation of socially acceptable behavior. It wasn't until 2008, give or take, that the middle finger went mainstream, in no small part, thanks to the pretty much hourly offering of it to Barack Obama by Fox News. As a result of Mason's middle, meanwhile, Sullivan banned him from the, then, very influential weekly variety show and it took years for Mason's career to get even close to back on track.
In more recent funny people faux pas presentations, Michael Richards, who endeared himself for ten years as the hipster doofus, Kramer, on the mother of all shows about nothing, "Seinfeld" self immolated his success by letting a couple of hecklers get to him during a stand-up and responded with a meltdown level spew of N-words that would have made my stock in asterisks jump twenty points, easy. As opposed to Mason, Richards' career became the stuff of cheesy Hallmark Card-esque poetry, "that which once burned so bright / hath now gone down-eth in flames."
Other comedy contributors, from Louis C.K. to Wanda Sykes to Dane Cook to Margaret Cho to Amy Schumer, even, again, all the way back to the Paleozoic era of Joan Rivers have not only pushed envelopes, they've managed to turn more than a few of those envelopes into confetti.
America, by the dozens of millions, have giggled, guffawed, laughed and applauded, and applaud, them.
And don't bother coming back at me with the ridiculous notion that "that kind of so-called humor" is the kind of crap that "all you snowflake libtards" think is funny while "we, good, God fearing, freedom loving real Americans find it repulsive and offensive".
There simply aren't enough snowflake libtards in the universe to account for the total number of people who find these comics and their comedy funny.
If there were, it's a safe bet that Donald wouldn't have been selected to open the mail addressed to "Occupant" at 1600 Pennsylvania.
But, let's get back to our conversation regarding Kathy's severed head and Bill's appalling asterisks.
And the real issue in play here.
A perplexing and persistently pesky inability to determine, decide and declare, once and for all, no more exceptions, forever and ever, amen.....
...where to draw the line.
Common sense, you say?
Nice try. Common sense, like its currently M.I.A. cousins, common decency, common interest, common ground, common taste and common values, is undefinable without a ground zero to serve the function of being a starting point.
Which requires the...wait for it....drawing of a line.
And the X factor in any, and all, efforts to chart that starting point, name that ground zero, define the undefinable is an insurmountable and impenetrable circumstance.
Or, more accurately, condition.
The human condition.
You say potato and he says pahtahto.
She says tomato and I say tohmahto.
Someone says "tit for tat".
And someone else gasps audibly and insists on asterisks.
Let's just call a spade a spade. (No racial inference intended or admitted to).
There's a whole lot of people in this country who would proudly stand up next to her, defend her to this day and will follow faithfully any effort put forth to keep, or at least fake keeping, the promise to make America great again who spend a fair amount of their leisure time enjoying the old fashioned, family friendly, wholesome whole grain goodness of such contributions to comedy as....
"2 Broke Girls"...Laverne and Shirley for the T&A/it's okay to say "vagina" on national TV nowadays crowd, complete with an Asian supporting character who makes that "Seinfeld! Four!" guy seem like the dictionary definition of politically correct.....
" Family Guy"...the animated, warmhearted day to day adventures of the Griffin family, featuring misogynist, racist dad Peter, lisping homosexual Bruce, elderly pedophile Herbert, drug dispensing date rapist Glenn, whose dad, at one point, hilariously transitions to a woman and sleeps with the family dog, Brian....all of whom spring from the "cutting edge comedy" mind of Seth MacFarlane who, as I've suggested more than once, is really just the grown up equivalent of that kid in our high school class who got laughs by making fart noises with his armpit, but, much to his, and our, chagrin discovered that his only comic skill turned out to be the ability to make fart noises with his armpit.....
MacFarlane, by the way, is also the acclaimed arm pit-ster responsible for "American Dad" , "The Cleveland Show" and other slices of American pie that rationalize their putrid by labeling it "parody", as in "we're not showing you gross and disgusting, we're mocking gross and disgusting and showing you that.."
Songwriter Randy Newman used that methodology frequently in his 70's writing heyday, most successfully in the song "Short People" which brilliantly sounded like a ridicule of people lacking height but was, in fact, a vicious indictment of the cruelty of people who ridiculed people lacking height.
That said, I grew up on Randy Newman, I respect Randy Newman, I often feel like I almost know Randy Newman. And, Seth...you're no Randy Newman.
And among those who laugh heartily at the sophomoric Seth and laugh bigly at broke girls and their Asian fall guy, there are, bet the bwahahas, a sizable number of folks who would like to see Kathy Griffin end up like Donald did in the photo and Bill taken down to the big oak tree and shown what gets done to uppity white guys who make very bad jokes about an entire race of asterisks.
Because Kathy and Bill went over the line.
That line that either continues to move wherever and whenever, based on personal opinion or lack of, taste, or lack of, personal judgement, of lack of, from those who simply don't understand the principle of physics that explains the impossibility of placing a definitive, permanent mark on a constantly moving surface...or that line that doesn't exist in the first place. For the same reason.
No such thing, daddy used to wisely counsel us, as a little bit pregnant.
No such thing as a little bit offensive or inappropriate.
No such thing as a little bit tasteless.
There's a lot of people in this country who have a problem with pounds.
Not as in spare tires, muffin tops, beer bellies or thunder thighs.
As in "in for a penny...".
And, not for nothin', but the pretty much unnoticed irony that both Seth MacFarlane's much loved and enjoyed Peter and the much reviled and scarlet lettered Kathy have the same last name?
Now, that's funny.
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