Last night on my flight home to California, I was watching the Comedy Central roast of David Hasselhoff. The JetBlue flight I was on had some DirecTV and XM channels, so I spent most of the flight flipping between the Giants vs. Jets Monday night game, some MTV shows, and the roast since I don't have cable at home.
And as I always expect, the Parents Television Council
released a statement denouncing the roast and calling for Congress to pass legislation allowing for cable channel choice. But this year, it wasn't just merely the cursing and sexual vulgarity and taboo topics that outraged America's moral guardians there.
Americans are fortunate – indeed we are blessed – to have a constitutionally-guaranteed right of free speech. And as offensive as “comedy” may be to some, we have a right in this country to speak it. Sadly the cable television industry has concocted a scheme whereby those who are most shocked, offended or harmed by such “humor” are forced to subsidize it.
In order to watch a powerful History Channel presentation about the horrors of slavery, cable subscribers were forced to underwrite jokes about African Americans, slave ships and picking cotton.
In order to watch a cable news report about religious struggles in the Middle East, cable subscribers were forced to underwrite jokes about Jews wanting to jump into an oven at Auschwitz.
Comedy Central, and its corporate parent Viacom, could offer such a program on a premium or pay-per-view basis. But with their anti-consumer, anti-competitive market leverage, they are able to bundle Comedy Central with their other owned networks, prohibiting their offended customers from opting out of paying for such a flagrant diatribe.
While I detest the PTC's
astroturfing of FCC complaints and generally overly prudish attitudes towards sex and language, I think that PTC president Tim Winter (who's actually a liberal Democrat, before anyone decides he's a conservative Republican just because of his opinion about the Roast) is spot on with his History Channel/news analogy.
If you subscribe to cable or satellite as it is now, your subscription dollars are also supporting the lying, hateful, right-wing propaganda arm known as the Fox News Channel, not just the raunchy leftist anti-moral shows on Comedy Central, FX, and MTV that PTC
finds to be causing the end of the world. Also, do realise that the ABC Family Channel shows
The 700 Club because of a contract by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, which founded the network as CBN Satellite and changed it to several different names during the 80s and 90s. So if you wanted to catch reruns of
Boy Meets World or
Full House on ABC Family or want to check out the channel's original programs (like
Secret Life of the American Teenager) you also pay for the channel to broadcast archaic religious propaganda (and controversial comments like
Haiti deserved the earthquake).
While this is the rare time I agree with the PTC, shouldn't the PTC be hammering Fox News too if it's so concerned about racist jokes? Because I think that Glenn Beck's non-stop
Nazi analogies (including comparing Obama admin to the Nazi regime and comparing Fox News to the Jews during Holocaust) are far far worse than some late-night roast jokes, right? Fact is...Fox News's propaganda shows are broadcast when impressionable children are in the audience and likely to swallow up the message of "Obama is a socialist pinko Nazi who's plotting to destroy America" repeatedly marketed by Beck, Hannity, and the goon squad. Those programs don't even have Parental Guidelines ratings. In contrast, the Comedy Central roasts are shown only after the 10/9c "watershed" slot and have TV-MA ratings. So which media outlet is poisoning children's minds more likely? (Oh yeah, aren't
South Park and
The Daily Show even more intellectual and rational than anything you'll see on Fox News???)
And finally, are topics like slavery, murder, and genocide ever taboo in comedy, or should comedians just approach those topics with extreme discretion? (Last year, the PTC
also slammed the Joan Rivers roast for having jokes allegedly about child molestation.) I think that the PTC is taking the former side that any joke about sensitive topics are offensive. But I bet the same moral conservatives outraged at Comedy Central roast jokes then turn on the radio to Rush Limbaugh and find no issue with his crude, classless, racist substandard attempts at humor. One joke in the Hasselhoff roast by Lisa Lampanelli (spelling?) said that if Hasselhoff's music was played in Auschwitz the Jews would be running to the ovens.
This blog has some more examples of offensive roast jokes including some more that invoked the Holocaust, black culture, and even the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. I bet a lot of you here oppose Rush Limbaugh's and Michael Savage's loose trash talk about minorities and easily said Nazi analogies. So do you find Comedy Central roast jokes near the same severity, or are those jokes in a completely different context?