If we get beyond the debate about whether young women have sex drives and have any entitlement to explore…there is a disconnect in the minds of young women, particularly teens and even young twenties, on what it takes to raise a kid. To tell them is to be the crabapple at the ball, when, really, that IS responsiblity.

The public at large wants a “just say no” campaign, and the anti-choicers want the scene to fade to black after taking the picture of new mother with baby in delivery room.

Feminists have a bone to pick with those approaches, but I’d also have a bone to pick with feminists saying “leave her alone” when people try to tell a young pregnant woman that certainly, now, she’s written a check that her family will have to help pay in care and money (not that they should have any plans) and society has to pay in welfare. It’s really not full responsibility if you cannot support and care for a child. Financial resources has something to do with it, maturity has something to do with it. And somehow, to say so, breaks that lovely foggy, misty picture that people want to paint about the whole “I’m keeping my baby” heroism.

Just as women should have the right to chose, older parents should have the right to not have to raise another set of kids basically left at their doorstep, which is often where this “I’m keeping my baby” goes when it is a very young mom. I’ve seen older parent emburdened with their aging parents, their kids, and then their “noble” girl’s kids who did the right thing and “kept” the baby. Sometimes these noble people are noble on another person’s resources and life.

The Sarah Silverman show had a brilliant send-up of “gentle” comedy, by the way. The send-up, of course, was aggressive humor and hysterical.

Oh shit, I remember that. I felt mortified for that guy.

The Sarah Silverman show had a brilliant send-up of “gentle” comedy, by the way. The send-up, of course, was aggressive humor and hysterical.

I dont think sarah silverman is that far from joan rivers, at base. both of them i find self-hating in different ways, & some alike. and they both fuck/ed really repulsive men –that has got to be a form of self-loathing.

what pisses me off about tina fey’s character (& too many other similar ones out there) is the agism moreso than the looksism. they trowel on the supposed cliches & self-hatred in relation to her looks & how she must feel as an aging woman, etc.. & i sit back & think, Wtf?! theyre telling ME & other women how we should think about aging, & i never felt that –until they put the fucking thought into my head! Fuck THEM!

Is it always offensive? No.
Some of the best, the truly genius, are not offensive:
mitch hedberg, the guys from flight of the conchords, etc… they get the funny done without trying to be offensive & they manage to do it with little true aggression. the ones that go for offensive are going for the cheap, & i tire of them quickly because theyre inferior, & in the end, they dont make you feel any better for having watched them.

Actually I think you don’t need to have specific knowledge of the actual shows or general format of the BBC in those days to get that Python was satirizing. That sheep thing for instance–I hadn’t seen the British media, but I did know that the Concorde SST was a joint Anglo-French venture, and that was enough to clue me in to the specific point of the French part of the skit, and recognize the nesting sheep part as a set-up. Presumably the Concorde project, which needed and got massive financial support from the British government, was heavily promoted on British TV.

Obviously the more you know about the cultural setting of any piece of art, the more you will get it. But vice versa, people learn stuff from context and a lot of what I know, or think I know at any rate, about British society in the mid-20th century is from watching Python shows.

Just as a lot of what I know about US history and culture in general turns out to have first been presented to me via Warner Brothers cartoons. I found that invaluable in grad school.

By focusing on the points where culture goes whacky, comedy tends to be a very efficient sketcher of Big Pictures. You can largely infer the boring parts by seeing how people are imagined to handle the weird.

As for the degeneracy of SNL; well, I hardly ever watched it live after I went to college in 1983. Unlike jon and his acquaintences, I am in the opposite position: I saw most of the run of the original NRFTP cast when they first aired in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And yes there were duds but by and large the show reliably killed. Well of course I was just in Jr High and HS. Still, years later, those eps often still have bite and freshness, whereas every replacement cast I have ever glanced at since seems incredibly lame and stale in comparison. I think it was that the 70s were a sort of brief pop cultural Indian summer before the general chill of the 80s and after drove good stuff out of the mainstream. For whatever reason, while a few good people seem to have emerged as fugitives from the latter generations of SNL, by and large these people represent what I despise about how mainstream, big-budget TV/movie culture has evolved.

But then I haven’t even seen a “best-of” compilation of any SNL post 1983. I’ve heard of the Church Lady and Wayne’s World; that’s about it. I saw Mean Girls having not a clue who Tina Fey might be.