Bleep Rights!

One or another of those cable channels has been advertising the daylights out of the "First Amendment Comedy Tour", or whatever they're calling it. And they have the comedians (and I use the term guardedly) express their ideas of what the First Amendment means. One said something like "It means I can say whatever the bleep I want, however the bleep want to say it."

Actually, that isn't what it says. It merely says that the government cannot infringe on your rights of speech, press, religion and assembly. But it doesn't mean you have the perfect right to tell me, as a private citizen, whatever the bleep you want to say.

In other words, the First Amendment doesn't give you carte blanch to be a bleep, you bleeping bleep and bleepity-bleep bleepitude.

But since I have no intention of watching the show anyway, it's immaterial. It isn't that foul language bothers me, or that their edge "challenges me" in some way. I just don't think any of the stuff on the previews was funny, and since I reason that the best jokes always appear on the previews, the lack of yuks from the previews don't augur well for the show itself.

But I am not historically a big fan of stand-up comedy in general. There have been a few stand-up comedians that I thought were quite funny - Mitch Hedburg comes to mind, who should be immortalized for the forklift joke, if nothing else - but by and large, stand-up comedy leaves me cold. (I am reminded of the antacid commercial where the guy in the audience gets up because his heartburn is killing him, and the comedian lays into him. Meantime the poor sufferer stands there in the spotlight while the git on the stage mocks him. Just keep walking, you moron, there's no rule that says you have to stand there and be made fun of, especially when you're in pain. Geez. I had no idea stand-up comedy was such a minefield of angst and despair.)

Meantime, I'm too busy watching Firefly episodes to pay any attention to unfunny comedians who can't say "water fountain" without throwing in a few expletives. Firefly is pretty good. I missed it when it was on actual TV (and thus I was an unwitting accomplice in the poor ratings that got the show canned prematurely) but now I've decided to go back and catch up, and it's good. It's like Star Trek, only grimy. This isn't your clean, tidy, Utopian future; this is more or less Deadwood in space, though without E.B. Farnum's operatic manner of speaking.

It's good. Better than the First Amendment comedy crock, I bet.