Prof. Stone says it's "depressing" that the Court's "fleeting expletives" opinion repeatedly used "f***" and "s***"...

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Bill Maher to Rush Limbaugh: "You know what, Rush, when you can stand up in front of an audience of 3,000 people all the time like I do..."

I've already blogged about what Bill Maher said on his show last night about Rush Limbaugh, so forgive me if you've already had enough of the Maher-Limbaugh topic, but this really is something else and I have something different to say. Maher said:

The word that they're upset about. I never said on this show.

What is he referring to? He did call Sarah Palin a "dumb twat" on the show. (See?)

It was in my standup act, which I consider the last bastion of free speech. 

The word, apparently, is "cunt," and he used it in his standup show. He tones it down a notch for HBO.

There's a reason people compare me to George Carlin — 'cause we're standup comedians. 

By the way, "twat" wasn't even on  Carlin's original list of "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." "Cunt" was. Later, Carlin expanded the list, and "twat" got on along with "fart" and "turd." It's like a late year in the history of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, when The Beatles and The Rolling Stones got in long ago, like 2002 and they're getting around to Gene Pitney and Brenda Lee. It's an analogy! I don't owe Brenda an apology. If people are too dumb to handle analogies, why do we even have democracy? Let's just make Obama king, stop talking about politics, and spend our lives dancing and singing.

Did you watch that Carlin clip? Astounding! Maher cites "people" who compare him to George Carlin. He doesn't dare claim the comparison sprang out of his own semi-bald dome. But I'll compare him to Carlin: Bill Maher is not at all as funny or perceptive as George Carlin. Now that's a comparison. What did those other people who compared Maher to Carlin say? I'd like to know, because I'd like to do a comparison comparison. I think mine is better.

Back to this quote from last night that I'm trying to analyze:

Rush Limbaugh likes to say he's a comedian. 

No, he doesn't! Rush's critics like to call him a comedian. When it suits their purposes. Other times they like to say he's the spokesman for the Republican Party. And that's what Rush likes to say. I listen to the show all the time, so I know what he likes to say. Unlike a lot of people who love to hate Rush and simply react to out-of-context quotes they've been fed.

But Rush uses humor. He likes to "use absurdity to illustrate the absurd."

Mayer continues:

You know what, Rush, when you can stand up in front of an audience of 3,000 people all the time like I do and make them spill their fuckin' guts out and laugh their asses off for 90 minutes, you're a comedian. 

Rush doesn't do theater shows — which tend to be scripted with crafted jokes told one after the other — and let's grant Maher that Rush would be bad at that. But Rush does sit down at a microphone 3 hours a day, 5 days a week and hold the attention of not 3,000 people but many millions. For 20 years. Maher could not do that. These are different activities. Both deploy humor as they talk about politics, but they do it in a different way. Maher's bragging that he's doing much more than Rush... it's as off as the implication that he's as good as Carlin.

But you're not a comedian. And when you do that, I say, my rule: You get a little extra leeway. 

Each humorist can decide for himself how much leeway he's going to take. And people will decide whether to give it to him. He can't dictate a rule, except as a joke. You don't get the leeway because you do standup comedy (or a radio show using absurdity to illustrate absurdity). You get what people feel like giving you. And what we feel is a response to what you do. It's a mystery why we feel the way we do. We're not following any rules. It's a personal relationship, like love.

But if I offended women, I'm sorry. I don't have a problem saying I'm sorry. 

Oh, but you do, Bill. Because that is not an apology. It's easy to say "I'm sorry" in the sorry-if-you-are-offended form, i.e., a nonapology.

I don't know why women would want to align themselves with Sarah Palin. I don't know why an insult to her is an insult to all women, but if it is, I'm sorry.

If... and obviously, you don't think it is. The joke — not a terribly good one, not anything that's going to make us spill our "fuckin' guts" out over— is that women shouldn't see Sarah Palin as one of the women who count. If we can isolate her over there with the bad people, we can call her a name that is specific to women: a "cunt." Is the use of a woman-specific insult something that switches the subject to all women? That is, is "cunt" like a racist epithet? If one black person is called the n-word, the topic ceases to be whether that one black person is a bad guy. Or is "cunt" like "dick"? If one guy is called a "dick," we stay on topic: the way that one guy is a "dick." I wrote "cunt," "dick," and "n-word," so you can see what my answer is. I'm for sexual equality... and abandoning the famously hurtful racial epithet.

So let humorists of all kinds select the language they want to use. Let them be gentle or cutting. There are all sorts of things you can do with words. There are no rules. There are no 7 dirty words for TV or extra leeway for extracting puke from 3,000 theater-ticket buyers. There is a mystery to using words to reach other human beings, and you're all on your own.

"The right to petition your government is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."

"We the People provides a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. We created We the People because we want to hear from you. If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response."

This is an interesting part of the official White House website, which I noticed for the first time last night when I was blogging about Christopher Dodd and discovered the petition demanding an investigation of his lobbying activities on behalf of the movie industry. (Is "lobbying" the wrong word?)

There were 10,378 signatures on the petition when I put the post up, and there are 16,459 now. (I'm not claiming credit for the increase.) 25,000 signatures are needed to force the White House staff to review it and respond. Note that you have to "create an account" on the White House site to sign, and if you sign your first name and last name initial, along with the name of your city, will be posted on the site. So that's something of a deterrent to signing. It's a bit of a test of how much you trust government.

When fascism comes to America, it will be with a smiley face (as George Carlin famously said (and Jonah Goldberg turned into a book cover)).

The White House will have your information, correlated to the petitions you've signed. You can see the subject matter of the currently open petitions. Click on filter by issue to get a sense of the issues raised by the people who trust the website with their information (and believe there's some point in petitioning this White House). That seems to explain why there are 0 petitions in the category "Firearms," but 15 in "Civil Rights and Liberties" and 13 in "Human Rights."

You can also filter by the number of signatures, and at the moment, the petition with the most signatures says: "Actually take these petitions seriously instead of just using them as an excuse to pretend you are listening." Well, naturally... what did you expect? How seriously should the government take 25,000 signatures?

But this is one way the internet is working now, for what it's worth. Check out the video they used to announce the new petition function. (This came out last August, and I didn't notice.) I am amused by the effort — by the White House! — to display youthful innocence and enthusiasm. Very smiley face:



"It's an official way to make your voice heard.... And if your petition is among the most popular, a group of White House policy officials..." Video frame suddenly widens to show 9 young people in suits sitting around a White House table. They smile and wave at us. "... like this good-looking bunch, will review it, make sure it gets to the right people in the Obama administration, and craft an official response."

The right people in the Obama administration? But will they be a good-looking bunch? Because I want good-looking bunches crafting a response. An official response. Because it's an official way to make my voice heard. And policy officials will be reviewing my official petition to give an official response. Are you sure all this is official? And is everybody good-looking? Okay, then. Start crafting responses. Because after you've given me this official way to blow off steam, what will help me reach closure in this process is a well-crafted response. Official response. Official and well-crafted.

Thank you, President Obama and your good-looking bunch of officials. Thank you for this official outlet for all our frustrations with government.

The shopping trip.

1. We went to a building supply showroom to look at some doors. All my doubts about fiberglass doors that are made to look like wood were shattered, but I was freaked out in the kitchen section by the fake waffles display:



2. We prowled the outdoor racks at Home Depot to get about 300 plants — a few extra odds and ends after the thousands of bulbs and seedlings Meade has mail-ordered. After 25 years of accepting whatever the heavens bestowed upon my patch of real estate, I'm amazed at the number of plants one buys to do the landscaping professionally.



3. Leaving the parking lot, we kept our distance from these people who were displaying the hilarious, age-old confidence in the ability of the human hand to secure a large item of furniture on the roof of the car. (And note the classic "baby on board" sign.)



It's like they're trying to act out old comedy routines:

1. Baby on Board:



2. The power of the hand:

"Any person who vitiates the atmosphere in any place so as to make it noxious..."

There's a dispute in Malawi over whether that language, in a criminal statute, outlaws farting.

Hey, that remind me of an old story about George Bush:

What the President thinks of the use of weird words. Having just expounded on the use of strange words, I especially enjoyed this extract--in Slate's always appreciated we-read-this-so-you-don't-have-to series--from Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack":

Page 186: Bush aide Nick Calio declares his intention to vitiate a congressional filibuster. Bush says, "Nicky, what the f**k are you talking about, vitiate?"

More on the inadvisability of using the word "vitiate" here. As for farting in public, I've only written about it before in connection with Saul Alinsky and Chris Matthews. And here's that wonderful George Carlin routine.

Let's take a closer look at those 310 million tits.

I love the Simpson "tit" flap. Even as the "Ground Zero Mosque" saved us from having to talk about the economy, that giant udder with 310 million tits has saved us from further discussion of that damned mosque. This is good, from Jacob Sullum:

The mention of outraged feminists suggests that Simpson stands accused of sexist vulgarity. I have to admit that I was shocked the first time I saw my mother use tit in a Scrabble game, but I was about 12 at the time, and she explained that the word is a perfectly acceptable variation of teat. Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary backs her up, saying tit is deemed "vulgar" only when it refers to a woman's breast. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary likewise lists "teat" as the first definition for tit, although it notes that the usage is "now obscure" except in certain dialects (such as Alan Simpson's, evidently). So even by the arbitrary standards that make certain words unacceptable in polite company, in  family newspapers, and on broadcast television between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m (though that last rule may be a thing of of the past), Simpson need not apologize for his use of tit.

Ha. That reminds me of this part of one of George Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" routines:

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off. But I mean that word does not belong on the list.

Or this — not about "tits," but conceptually more apt:

[C]ocksucker is a compound word and neither half of that is really dirty. The word - the half suckercock is a half-way dirty word, 50% dirty - dirty half the time, depending on what you mean by it. Uh, remember when you first heard it, like in 6th grade, you used to giggle. And the cock crowed three times, heh, the cock - three times. It's in the Bible, cock in the Bible. ...
Now the word twat is an interesting word. Twat! Yeh, right in the twat. Twat is an interesting word because it's the only one I know of, the only slang word applying to the, a part of the sexual anatomy that doesn't have another meaning to it. Like, ah, snatch, box and pussy all have other meanings, man. Even in a Walt Disney movie, you can say, We're going to snatch that pussy and put him in a box and bring him on the airplane.

AND: Could someone digitally alter this scene and replace Woody Allen with Alan Simpson?

"Bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with 'dirt' spur the development of a healthy immune system."

Don't stop your baby from eating his germs 'n' worms!

Hot science news? George Carlin said it decades ago:

The Hudson River was loaded with raw sewage. That's right, we swam in raw sewage. You know, to cool off. And back then the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids every year were dying of polio. But you know what, in my neighborhood, nobody ever got polio. No one. Ever. You know why? BECAUSE WE SWAM IN RAW SEWAGE. It strengthened our immune system. The polio never had a chance. We were tempered in raw shit. What are you going to do when some super virus comes along that turns your vital organs into liquid shit? I'll tell you what you're gonna do. You're gonna get sick and you're gonna die and you're gonna deserve it because you're fuckin' weak and you have a fuckin' weak immune system.

Admit it! You're jealous of Jon Favreau!

"'He looks like he's in college and everybody calls him Favs, so you're like, "This guy can't be for real, right?"' said Ben Rhodes, another Obama speechwriter. 'But it doesn't take long to realize that he's totally synced up with Obama. . . . He has access to everything and everybody. There's a lot weighing on his shoulders.'"

Totally synced up with Obama... a 27-year-old guy... and he's the one writing those golden words.

Three months ago, Favreau lived in a group house with six friends in Chicago, where he rarely shaved, never cooked and sometimes stayed up to play video games until early morning....

Last month, Favreau met for an hour in Chicago with Obama... and they agreed to theme [the inaugural address] around, Favreau said, "this moment that we're in..."

Just like an "American Idol" finale song!

"... and the idea that America was founded on certain ideals that we need to take back."

Claim the Framers for your side. Good move! Make liberalism traditional.

Obama asked for a first draft by Thanksgiving. Favreau explained that he had planned a vacation and promised a draft by this week.

What a cocky guy! Imagine telling Obama -- who's entrusted you with the inauguration speech -- that you've got a vacation planned. Man, I would have just made a mental note to cancel my vacation, wouldn't you?

During his vacation, Favreau e-mailed notes to himself via BlackBerry while visiting friends in Manhattan and talked about structure at his family's Thanksgiving dinner.

Talked about structure at his family's Thanksgiving dinner... uh, okay. I guess that means the structure of the inaugural address. Not just structure, generally. Which is what we talk about chez Althouse. The structure of the universe, the structure of scientific revolutions, the structure of white and dark meat on the avian skeleton, etc.

Favreau... listens to Obama tell stories in his office and spins them into developed metaphors, rich in historical context. When Obama delivers a speech on the road, Favreau studies the recording and notes the points at which Obama departs from the text so he can refine the riffs and incorporate them next time.

In four years together, Obama and Favreau have perfected their writing process....

So he started this mind-merge when he was 23?

[I]n 2004, ... Obama, just elected to the Senate, needed to hire a speechwriter. He brought Favreau, then 23, into the Senate dining room for an interview on his first day in office. They talked for 30 minutes about harmless topics such as family and baseball before Obama turned serious.

"So," he said. "What's your theory on speechwriting?"

Theory! I love that. Now, what would you have said at that point? Theory? Speechwriting has a theory? Uh...

"A speech can broaden the circle of people who care about this stuff," Favreau said. "How do you say to the average person that's been hurting: 'I hear you. I'm there. Even though you've been so disappointed and cynical about politics in the past, and with good reason, we can move in the right direction. Just give me a chance.' "

"I think this is going to work," Obama said.

So, presumably, that was just about the best answer to an interview question anyone ever gave. Or do you think Favreau also has some magical charisma that Obama saw and saw himself in?

Two weeks after the election, Favreau accepted a new job that essentially came with a new life. He moved back to Washington, hired a real estate agent, bought his first apartment and ordered furniture from Pottery Barn that sits unopened in nine boxes lined against his wall. He will need to buy more jackets and ties to replace his preferred outfit of jeans and a sweater. Friends joke that Favreau suddenly turned 40 this year -- but he still shows flashes of 27.

At a party at his parents' house over Thanksgiving vacation, he danced and posed awkwardly next to a cardboard cutout of Clinton.

He cupped his hand over her "breast."

A buddy uploaded photos onto Facebook, reporters discovered them, and suddenly experts were debating Favreau's maturity on television. Favreau called Clinton and Obama to apologize. They told him not to worry, but he still does.

Don't worry, Jon, everyone is just hopelessly -- profoundly -- jealous. It's got to drive everyone crazy that you are 27.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian says:

Jealousy and disgust are not the same thing.

It says a lot about both Favreau and Obama that they apparently find it acceptable to generalize their supposed beliefs as "this stuff". I'm surprised that given Favreau's demographic and apparent lifestyle he didn't say "a speech can broaden the circle of people who care about this shit." Shit, stuff... who can be bothered to actually be specific about any of that "hopey-changey" nonsense? Apparently not even Obama or the guy who writes the crap for him.

In a way, though, this guy is the archetype of the Obama devotee. He doesn't really have much in the way of life experience or wisdom, but he's smart enough and educated enough that he can simulate it. Everything is simply meta-comment, removed from actual experiences, motivations or beliefs. He can cobble together lofty-sounding rhetoric while living in a house with six people, sitting up all night playing video games and then, presumably, sleeping all day while the "average person who's been hurting" is out there trying to pay the bills. He thinks it perfectly appropriate to tell his boss, the next President of the United States of America, that his deadline is getting in the way of his vacation and, amazingly, his boss accepts that. Because why let something trivial like another lofty, empty speech at the Presidential Inauguration get in the way of "visiting friends in Manhattan"? Now, of course, he's rolling in cash so he calls up a real estate agent and orders an apartment and calls up Pottery Barn and orders some furniture so he can set up something approaching one of those "home" things that the "average person who's been hurting" seem to like and want so much. Hell, maybe he should start thinking about getting one of those "family" things that everyone seems to have... Eh, who has time for that now? He's got so much "hope" and "change" to cram into another speech, so many ill-fitting suits to buy, so many raids scheduled in World of Warcraft... and he hasn't even shaven yet!

Jon Favreau: a blank slate writing aphorisms onto another blank slate.

And yet, what is undeniable is that this writing worked in the real world on millions of people. There is a mystery to writing, and some people have a gift, and they can give the impression of understanding all sorts of feelings and experiences that they have never had. I'm thinking of cheeky young novelists and songwriters who somehow make people believe they've tapped the depths. Stuff like this.

Or should I say shit. But I like stuff:

Is the f-word indecent or just coarse and unmannerly?

It makes a difference, according to Jeffrey Rosen, talking about the Supreme Court's pending "fleeting expletives" case. (The question is what can the FCC do to broadcasters if Cher suddenly says "People have been telling me I'm on the way out every year, right? So fuck 'em" and so forth.)

At the Supreme Court argument, Justice Antonin Scalia lamented the "coarsening of manners," adding, "I am not persuaded by the argument that people are more accustomed to hearing these words than they were in the past." I share Scalia's concerns about the coarsening of public manners on television, but he is willfully denying the evidence that most Americans no longer view fleeting expletives as indecent. The Supreme Court has said that the FCC can only ban epithets that are considered genuinely offensive by contemporary community standards. For that reason, the justices should strike down the Bush FCC's fleeting expletive policy, and, if they don't, the Obama FCC should repeal it. But this suggests a real problem--the vulgarization of culture--without a clear legal, political, or even technological solution.

I originally wrote out "fuck" in the post title, but then I changed it.... if that means anything. I doubt if my sensibilities here are much more probative of what "people" are accustomed to hearing these days than Scalia's.

"If I say 'F#$% Kevin Martin and the horse he rode in on,' am I obviously encouraging rape and bestiality?"

Asked Dan Drezner, quoted by Language Log's Geoff Nunberg in his post about the oral argument in the Supreme Court case about "fleeting expletives" in the broadcast media. (Kevin Martin is the FCC chairman who favors fees for the broadcasters.) Nunberg examines the serious linguistic question whether it's true, as Martin said, that "the F-word 'inherently has a sexual connotation' whenever it's used."

Emphatic fucking may not depict or refer to sex, and may not even bring it explicitly to mind. But the link is still there. Why would these uses of the word be considered "dirty" if they weren't polluted by its primary literal use? And what could be the original source of that taint if not the word's literal denotation (or at least, of its denotation relative to the attitudes that obscene words presuppose about sex and the body)? In fact if fuck and fucking weren't connected to sex in all their secondary uses, they would serve no purpose at all.

Isn't it what we call a "dying metaphor"? The classic reference is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language":

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.

I think that applies to what Nunberg calls "emphatic fucking," a phrase which makes me think Nunberg wasn't interested in all the meanings of what he was saying or (more likely) Nunberg meant to amuse us with a vivid image as he wielded linguistic jargon.

Now it's very easy to conclude that the indignation that some people feel over the promiscuous use of epithetical fucking and the like is a reflection of their prudish inhibitions about sexuality, and that embracing the language helps to dispel those attitudes. As George Carlin put it, "There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions." That was an article of faith among a the faction among the sixties radicals who made sexual liberation an inseparable part of their political programs. As Jerry Rubin put it:

There's one word which Amerika hasn't destroyed. One word which has maintained its emotional power and purity. Amerika cannot destroy it because she dare not use it. It's illegal! It's the last word left in the English language: FUCK!

The naked human body is immoral under Christianity and illegal under Amerikan law. Nudity is called "indecent exposure." Fuck is a dirty word because you have to be naked to do it.

I think most cultural liberals still uncritically adopt a version of this understanding of the words. When they uphold people's right to use this sort of language in public against the attempts to censor or limit it, they think of themselves not just as defending free speech, but as striking a blow against sexual repression and hypocrisy. That is, they see themselves as being in a line that stretches back to the Lady Chatterly decision....

But if it ever were possible to purge fuck of its literal stigma by eliminating the inhibitions and hangups that the word seems to trail, the secondary uses of the word would lose their raison d'etre....

[W]e should acknowledge that the words are suffused with an affect that's derived from their sexual meanings.

The metaphor is not dead for Nunberg, and I think he wants to keep it alive. The word is good and useful because the metaphorical meaning still lives. Now, Nunberg was born in 1945. That's a lot older than Drezner. For Drezner, the word must seem much more casual and ordinary, more common and also less powerful. Nunberg appreciates the power that comes from sex, power that Drezner probably doesn't feel.

In Orwell's words: "the concrete melts into the abstract."

"'Sometimes funny has a sexual character.' Sometimes? Nearly always, according to Sigmund Freud."

"The whole point of humor, Freud thought, is to get around our inhibitions."

Jim Holt — author "Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes" — reacts to the story of Judge Alex Kozinski, his personal (but on-line) porn, and his wife's defense of it ("Alex is not into porn — he is into funny — and sometimes funny has a sexual character.")

The very ability to enjoy such humor means that you must be investing a good deal of energy in keeping your animal side in check. You are at least trying to be civilized. A dirty joke is an uprising against the bourgeois morality that enslaves most of us most of the time (and a good thing too). We can rejoice in its defeat only because that defeat is brief and inconsequential. In fact, our laughter itself brings the little uprising to an end. As most of us have discovered, laughter's a pretty strong anti-aphrodisiac.

Holt goes on to discuss sex humor in ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and Shakespeare. (For some reason, there are were no paragraph breaks in his longish column, so you'll have to overcome your resistance to reading a long block of text.)

He quotes George Orwell:

"The modern emphasis on what is called 'clean fun' is really the symptom of a general unwillingness to touch upon any serious or controversial subject."

So should we be suspicious of people who don't laugh at sexual humor?

There are two other classic theories of humor in competition with his. One of them is the "superiority theory," propounded in various forms by Plato, Thomas Hobbes and Henri Bergson, which says that laughter is a way of crowing victoriously over the humiliation of others. This theory works well at explaining the appeal of ethnic and racial jokes, of jokes about gays and drunkards and henpecked husbands and lawyers and women ("Why do women wear perfume and makeup?" goes a classic of this genre. "Because they're smelly and ugly.") The superiority theory sees mockery, hostility and aggression at the root of all humor. Morally speaking, it puts sexual humor in a pretty bad light, making it tantamount to verbal rape.

"Verbal rape" sounds bad, but don't forget that comedians love to say "I killed" when they made people laugh. So that would be verbal murder.

I think some mockery, hostility and (verbal) aggression is a good thing. And it's funny. The real question is who are your targets? In other words, what ideas are you expressing? You deserve to be judged for that, not the mocking aggression per se. Judged... and then, perhaps, let off the hook. Because you were joking.

The other time-honored view of humor has a rather sweeter flavor, and a more intellectual one. It is the "incongruity theory," versions of which were held by Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, which says that we laugh when the decorous suddenly dissolves into the absurd..... One of the images on the Kozinski website that the judge said he planned to delete -- it was "degrading," he said, "and just gross" -- was a depiction of women as cows. That's pure superiority theory, and as obscene as it is banal. But take this joke, reputedly a favorite of George H.W. Bush: "How do you titillate an ocelot? You oscillate its tits a lot." Ostensibly, it falls into the category of raunch, with its use of the not-ready-for-prime-time word for breasts and its winking allusion to bestiality. But it is essentially sheer nonsense, a sonic jeu d'esprit.

That reminds me, nobody supplied the comic answer to the George Carlin question I typed up for you last night (when I was watching hours of the HBO Carlin marathon). Carlin has a nice mix of wordplay and sex, and sometimes it's very funny just because the expected wordplay isn't there at all and it's just flatly sexual. But that the dissolution into the absurd that Blaise, Manny, and Artie were talking about, right?

"Do you know what a female peacock is?"

Are you watching the HBO marathon of all the old George Carlin comedy specials?

ADDED: "Have you noticed that mice have no shoulders at all?"

Jerry Seinfeld: "I was on the phone with George Carlin nine days ago and we were making some death jokes."

"We were talking about Tim Russert and Bo Diddley and George said: 'I feel safe for a while. There will probably be a break before they come after the next one. I always like to fly on an airline right after they’ve had a crash. It improves your odds.'"

Wow! I thought everyone knew the Rule of Three!

George Carlin died.

What a terrible loss. You know I thought he was the best living comedian. We were just talking about that here — last April. I've loved him since the 1970s. There are decades-old routines that spring to mind immediately as the most brilliant comic riffs I've ever heard — the one about all our "stuff" and the comparison between football and baseball (and golf).

"That's the whole meaning of life: trying to find a place for your stuff."



And here's the football/baseball one:



When someone dies, maybe you think about religion and the afterlife. Here's what George Carlin thought of such things:



Now, George Carlin has a special place among comedians because he's got a Supreme Court case about him — FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. You can read the case, and you can watch his 7 Dirty Words routine:



He elaborated on that over the years:



The text of the Supreme Court case includes the FCC's transcript of the version that got played on the radio:

The big one, the word fuck that's the one that hangs them up the most. [']Cause in a lot of cases that's the very act that hangs them up the most. So, it's natural that the word would, uh, have the same effect. It's a great word, fuck, nice word, easy word, cute word, kind of. Easy word to say. One syllable, short u. (laughter) Fuck. (Murmur) You know, it's easy. Starts with a nice soft sound fuh ends with a kuh. Right? (laughter) A little something for everyone. Fuck (laughter) Good word. Kind of a proud word, too. Who are you? I am FUCK. (laughter) FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) Tune in again next week to FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) It's an interesting word too, [']cause it's got a double kind of a life - personality - dual, you know, whatever the right phrase is. It leads a double life, the word fuck. First of all, it means, sometimes, most of the time, fuck. What does it mean? It means to make love. Right? We're going to make love, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. (laughter) we're really going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. Right? And it also means the beginning of life, it's the act that begins life, so there's the word hanging around with words like love, and life, and yet on the other hand, it's also a word that we really use to hurt each other with, man. It's a heavy. It's one that you have toward the end of the argument. (laughter) Right? (laughter) You finally can't make out. Oh, fuck you man. I said, fuck you. (laughter, murmur) Stupid fuck. (laughter) Fuck you and everybody that looks like you. (laughter) man. It would be nice to change the movies that we already have and substitute the word fuck for the word kill, wherever we could, and some of those movie cliches would change a little bit. Madfuckers still on the loose. Stop me before I fuck again. Fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump. Easy on the clutch Bill, you'll fuck that engine again.

Hey, I love the "[']." Try to do a Carlinesque riff on [']. Not easy, is it?

And God bless Justice Brennan, who dissented in Pacifica:

My Brother STEVENS, in reaching a result apologetically described as narrow, ante, at 750, takes comfort in his observation that "[a] requirement that indecent language be avoided will have its primary effect on the form, rather than the content, of serious communication," ante, at 743 n. 18, and finds solace in his conviction that "[t]here are few, if any, thoughts that cannot be expressed by the use of less offensive language." Ibid. The idea that the content of a message and its potential impact on any who might receive it can be divorced from the words that are the vehicle for its expression is transparently fallacious. A given word may have a unique capacity to capsule an idea, evoke an emotion, or conjure up an image. Indeed, for those of us who place an appropriately high value on our cherished First Amendment rights, the word "censor" is such a word. Mr. Justice Harlan, speaking for the Court, recognized the truism that a speaker's choice of words cannot surgically be separated from the ideas he desires to express when he warned that "we cannot indulge the facile assumption that one can forbid particular words without also running a substantial risk of suppressing ideas in the process." Cohen v. California, 403 U.S., at 26.

They don't write them like that anymore. They don't even say "My Brother Stevens" anymore. They couldn't bring themselves to say "My Sister O'Connor," I guess, so they had to stop saying "My Brother Stevens."

Was Carlin political? Here's what he said back in 2004 when Tim Russert (of all people) asked him "Do you vote?":

No, I don't. No. I voted up to McGovern. I feel, actually, a little purer, a little more detached emotionally from it. I really have no stake. If you dropped me from an airplane, I would come down left of center, because I believe more in humans than I do in property. But in terms of the minor machinations and the way they put these things together, I've no interest.

He was on Russert's show promoting his book "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" On the longest 1-day solo drive I ever took — from Austin, Texas to Madison, Wisconsin — I listened to Carlin read "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?"

I have a problem with the Ten Commandments. Here it is: Why are there ten? We don't need that many. I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It's clearly a padded list...

When these guys were sittin' around the tent makin' all this up, why did they pick ten? Why ten? Why not nine, or eleven? I'll tell you why. Because ten sounds important. Ten sounds official. They knew if they tried eleven, people wouldn't take them seriously. People would say, "What're you kiddin' me? The Eleven Commandments? Get the fuck outta here!"

I'm really sorry to see this man go. He worked long and hard so many years, making us laugh, bringing us enlightenment:

Mr. Carlin is constantly scribbling notions down in a notebook or recording them on a small voice recorder, and he spends most of his time typing, organizing and reorganizing his ideas in a library of 2,300 files he keeps on his computer — raw material he may someday forge into actual jokes, monologues or material for his books. And as soon as he has recorded a new HBO routine, he begins cycling in fresh material, so that over the course of two years, his entire routine is replaced, and he's ready to record another.

"It's like a sock," Mr. Carlin said. "I darn the sock so much that none of the original material is left. It's the same sock — it's my show — but the old material is gone."

"I have no hobbies and I have no leisure activities," Mr. Carlin added. "My greatest joy is working at the computer with my ideas."

RIP.

"Chris Matthews, Seriously. (O.K., Not That Seriously)."

I'm glad to see the title — on a NYT Magazine article previewed here — because I was just calling Matthews a comedian in the context of explaining his "sexist" remarks about Hillary — on video that you'll see on line probably later today. From the article:

Cable political coverage has changed... and so has the sensibility that viewers -- particularly young ones -- expect from it. Matthews's bombast is radically at odds with the wry, antipolitical style fashioned by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert or the cutting and finely tuned cynicism of Matthews's MSNBC co-worker Keith Olbermann. These hosts betray none of the reverence for politics or the rituals of Washington that Matthews does. On the contrary, they appeal to the eye-rolling tendencies of a cooler, highly educated urban cohort of the electorate that mostly dismisses an exuberant political animal like Matthews as annoyingly antiquated, like the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table whom the kids have learned to tune out.

But Matthews's performance is comic, is it not? I think he's more like Stewart and Colbert than Keith Obermann is. But there is something about Matthew's that uncool and loutish/boyish. He's more of a comedian the way Rush Limbaugh is a comedian — and I do think Rush Limbaugh is a comedian, not that he doesn't care about what he cares about. I mean, George Carlin cares about what he cares about, and he's a comedian. Not that Carlin — the best living comedian, right? — is uncool and loutish/boyish — cool and urban either for that matter.

ADDED: The NYT has put the whole article up. Here's the part about the "sexist" attitude toward Hillary:

Matthews says the notion that he is sexist has been pushed unfairly by blogs, women’s groups and, to some degree, the Clinton campaign. His remark that Clinton benefitted because her husband “messed around” triggered much outrage from the Clinton team. Matthews eventually apologized in a rambling on-air explanation, but he hardly sounds contrite now. “I was tonally inaccurate but factually true,” he told me. I had asked him earlier if he was forced into the apology. “Oh, yeah, of course I was forced into that,” he said, laughing. “No, no, no . . . Phil [Griffin] asked me to do that.”

Matthews vigorously denies the broader charge that he demeans women on the air. “I don’t think there’s any evidence of that at all,” he said at brunch. “I’ve gone back and looked. Give me the evidence. No one can give it to me. I went through all my stuff. I can’t find it.”

Sprezzatura.

Well, I see that The New Republic 's Lee Siegel has gone and gotten himself into trouble by participating in the production of blog comments in support of his own writing. The pseudonymous Sprezzatura went about slamming Siegel's critics, like Ezra Klein, who serves up the details and declines to gloat. And now TNR has killed Siegel's blog and suspended him from writing for the magazine.

The person I know with the best memory reminds me that in the past I've made fun of Lee Siegel's writing -- including once in a post with an update saying that the person I know with the best memory reminds me that in the past I've made fun of Lee Siegel's writing. So, I should be enjoying the poor critic's plight more than I'd realized.

Let's look at the old posts.

April 12, 2004:

"The marriage of comedy and politics is even more unhealthy than the marriage of church and state." So says Lee Siegel, TNR's TV critic. Too many metaphors: marriage and health. And unhealthy comedy is not going to kill anyone, whereas the diseases of the religion-state alliance have produced monumental evils throughout history.

But I agree with Siegel that right now politics is ruining comedy, especially The Daily Show (as I said here). Jon Stewart gets so much good press--the NYT never misses an opportunity to praise him--so it's really almost shocking to read strong criticism like this:

Stewart weighs down his jokes with a kind of Government 101 knowingness. He's not just funny about politics, you see, he's savvy about the way the system works, and he's going to help us through the maze. In Washington, "you have to cut through the partisan gridlock just to get to the bureaucratic logjam." Stop, you're killing me. But when it came to Richard Clarke and his controversial book, Stewart gave up even the pretense of being funny. ... Here was a slick, malleable, professional political advisor/operator, who had the choice of resigning in protest against an invasion of Iraq months before it took place, when such a protest might have had consequences, but chose instead to wait until his slighted ego burst at the seams--this Clarke, a true embodiment of human foible and folly, deserved to be manhandled by the spirit of laughter every bit as much as his accusations deserved to be defended by the spirit of truth. But like everybody else in public life, from politicians and pundits to performers and poets, Stewart wants to seem edifying and instructive. He wants to seem good.

Wanting to seem good is really bad for comedy. And, of course, picking a political side to be what is good is just bad for so many reasons. Siegel thinks Stewart is pandering to his audience, but I would think he's losing half of his audience. He's lost me. And (unlike Siegel) I was completely in love with him.

I'VE JUST GOT TO ADD: If I didn't independently agree with Siegel's opinion of The Daily Show, I would have been quite reluctant to trust him, because I think his instincts about comedy are a bit off, since he seems to have meant the following sentence to be taken seriously:

Politics hates the naked unbridled ego that laughter sets free; it hates it with the intensity with which laughter heaps its furies on the naked unbridled ego that hides behind the highflown sentiments of politics.

As Jon Stewart would say: Whaaaa?

From February 7, 2005:

Baby, you can't do my media criticism.

Here's the free link to get to Lee Siegel's TNR essay about why football provides the perfect showcase for ads. Assuming you want to get to it. It reads like this:

Last night, the brunt of the commercials during the first quarter were for cars, mostly SUVs and minivans. Even a very unexcited-looking Paul McCartney ("Thank you Super Bowl!" he kept shouting) sang, as the first of four songs in his halftime show, "Baby You Can Drive My Car." The interesting thing about a car is that it's a piece of property that you can inhabit while traversing, or entering, other people's property. That's what Brady's team was doing as it moved down the field. So what was happening in the stadium and what was occurring on the tube were mutual reinforcements of this illusion of sovereign motion.

Well, first, that really is not the interesting thing about a car. But second, what laughably tedious writing! The weird thing is that it reminded me a lot of the great old George Carlin routine comparing football and baseball.

Funnily enough, over at Klein's post, you can see that Sprezzatura said things like this:

There's this awful suck-up named Ezra Klein--his "writing" is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition--who keeps distorting everything Siegel writes--the only way this no-talent can get him. And I ask myself: why is it the young guys who go after Siegel? Must be because he writes the way young guys should be writing: angry, independent, not afraid of offending powerful people. They on the other hand write like aging careerists: timid, ingratiating, careful not to offend people who are powerful. They hate him because they want to write like him but can't. Maybe if they'd let themselves go and write truthfully, they'd get Leon Wieseltier to notice them too.

Ha! Lee Siegel is a ridiculously bad writer.

"The only thing I want to see that early, is coffee, the paper, and t*ts."

Said some guy explaining why he missed a morning basketball game, according to a column in Ladies Home Journal.

Did you read this post title and think hey, what's with that language on Althouse? It's from Ladies Home Journal. What's with that language in Ladies Home Journal?

And how bad is "t*ts," anyway? It's on the original George Carlin 7 Words You Can't Say on TV list, but even he, even way back when he started the list, immediately said "t*ts" didn't really belong on the list:

T*ts doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, T*ts, come here. T*ts, meet Toots, Toots, T*ts, T*ts, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco T*ts. The new Cheese T*ts, and Corn T*ts and Pizza T*ts, Sesame T*ts Onion T*ts, Tater T*ts, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off . But I mean that word does not belong on the list.

Colbert and the dissonance between religion and comedy.

Steve Colbert describes the set of "The Colbert Report":

Everything on the show has my name on it, every bit of the set. One of the things I said to the set designer—who has done everything, I mean even Meet The Press, he does that level of news design—was "One of your inspirations should be [DaVinci's painting] The Last Supper." All the architecture of that room points at Jesus' head, the entire room is a halo, and he doesn't have a halo." And I said, "On the set, I'd like the lines of the set to converge on my head." And so if you look at the design, it all does, it all points at my head. And even radial lines on the floor, and on my podium, and watermarks in the images behind me, and all the vertices, are right behind my head. So there's a sort of sun-god burst quality about the set around me. And I love that. That's status.

Speaking of Colbert and religion: Did you see his show on Thursday, with Paul Begala as the guest? Begala is going on about how he needed to teach Bill Clinton how to get his ideas across in short, simple form for the news. Begala describes how he made his point to Bill Clinton, who was bellyaching about how his wonky policies couldn't be condensed into sound bites. Begala reached in his back pocket and pulled out a copy of the New Testament that he's been carrying since 1979. At this point on the show, Begala actually pulls out the tattered, taped-together book and says he highlighted John 3:16 and handed it to Clinton. Begala hands the opened book to Colbert, points to the verse, tells Colbert to read it, and says he's going to time him to prove -- as he proved to Clinton -- how much can be said in 5 seconds. Colbert takes a slight glance at the book, flips it shut, looks straight at Begala and says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that those who believe in him shall not die but have eternal life." Begala says, triumphantly, "Four and a half seconds!" And Colbert says "That's the Christian sound bite."

I was struck by this moment on the show. The interview was going very well -- Begala speaking crisply (about speaking crisply) and Colbert slipping in perfect zingers. And then Begala wants to use the New Testament to prove a point about how he got through to Clinton. I felt that, reciting the verse, Colbert was not being the Colbert Report character but that his own religion was dictating that he had to say the verse as a demonstration of his own faith, and it wasn't right to fool around with that. I can't say why I feel so sure. The Colbert character would, I think, have been more pleased with himself to know the verse. You'd have felt the preen. I experienced this moment as a startling statement of faith, the kind of thing you don't normally see on TV.

The subject of Colbert and religion is an interesting one. He used to do "This Week in God" on "The Daily Show." When he was on "Fresh Air" a year ago, he talked about religion with Terry Gross:

Mr. COLBERT: This Week in God is--you know, This Week in God is, for me, a tightrope, because I--while I'm, you know, not a particularly religious person, I do go to church, which makes me kind of odd for my profession. You know, most people can't understand why I do, other comedians. And I have to walk that thin line because I don't want to criticize anyone's religions for the fact that it is a religion, and what's funny to me is what people do in the name of religion. ...

GROSS: Now you grew up in a family with--What?--11 children?

Mr. COLBERT: Yeah, I'm one of 11 kids. I'm the youngest.

GROSS: And was it a religious family? You say you go to church and...

Mr. COLBERT: Oh, absolutely.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. COLBERT: We're, you know, very devout and, you know, I still go to church and, you know, my children are being raised in the Catholic Church. And I was actually my daughters' catechist last year for First Communion, which was a great opportunity to speak very simply and plainly about your faith without anybody saying, `Yeah, but do you believe that stuff?' which happens a lot in what I do.

GROSS: Can I ask you a kind of serious question about faith?

Mr. COLBERT: I've been turning all of your funny questions into serious things for an hour or so. I don't see why you can't do the same to me.

GROSS: In the sketch we heard earlier from "This Week In God," you talked about the Christian pharmacist who refused to fill a prescription for birth control.

Mr. COLBERT: Right.

GROSS: Now the Catholic Church opposes birth control, which...

Mr. COLBERT: They do.

GROSS: ...I presume you do not and...

Mr. COLBERT: Presume away.

GROSS: ...so how do you deal with contradictions between, like, the church and the way you live your life, which is something that a lot of people in the Catholic Church have to deal with?

Mr. COLBERT: Well, sure. You know, that's the hallmark of an American Catholic, is the individuation of America and the homogenation of the church; homogenation in terms of dogma. I love my church and I don't think that it actually makes zombies or unquestioning people. I think it's actually a church that values intellectualism, but certainly, it can become very dogmatically rigid.

Somebody once asked me, `How do you be a father'--'cause I'm a father of three children--`and be anti-authoritarian?' And I said, `Well, that's not nearly as hard as being anti-authoritarian and being a Roman Catholic,' you know? That's really patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. I don't know. You know, I don't believe that I can't disagree with my church and I'll leave it at that.

I don't have a conclusion I'm driving at here. I love Steve Colbert and "The Colbert Report," and I'm fascinated by religion and comedy and the way the dissonance between the two affects a performer who is actually a believer.

UPDATE: Ambivablog questions my use of the word "dissonance." So let me say that I mean it in a good way. It's more difficult to be comical around a subject you respect, and working through a difficulty makes what you do more interesting. By contrast, when George Carlin jokes about religion, his comedy on the subject feels cheap and thin, because it's just flat-out obvious that he hates religion. I'd much rather listen to Colbert on the subject, and not just because I'm not entertained by hate. Colbert has to struggle with a problem, and he chooses to make comedy out of a subject that is complicated for him. I love that.

ADDED: You can listen to the great interview with Terry Gross here.

We're #1.

Just so everyone doesn't feel they need to email me, I have seen that the Princeton Review listed the University of Wisconsin-Madison as the #1 party school. What am I supposed to say? We're #1? I guess if you're going to have a reputation as a party school, you might as well rank first.

That reminds me of a thing in George Carlin's "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" — the book I listened to on yesterday's long drive home. He's talking about the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list and wondering about whether people on the list care about their high ranking — when there's a new addition to the list, does the guy who drops down to 11 feel bad about it?

Go to the link and do a "search inside the book" for "FBI" and you can read the passage. And speaking of ten, do a "search inside the book" for "Ten Commandments." Carlin considers the fact that there are ten commandments as evidence that people made it up. Carlin is just about as hostile as you can get toward religion, so this is not for everyone, but I found it absolutely brilliant and hilarious.

Enough rambling! Time to drink my breakfast.

Cascading nitrous thoughts.

Endodontist. I'd never been to one before. But I have now. I took the nitrous oxide, so whatever horrors were back there -- in nitrous world -- I'm not sure I noticed them at all.

There was I, thinking "I exist! I am not just a tooth!" and "I wonder if women experience work in their mouths differently from the way men do, given the closer similarity of the structure of the mouth and the genitalia. It must be more disturbing, this invasion of the mouth."

And then there was the gurgling of the endodontist's stomach, which was right next to my ear, producing a cascade of thoughts:

1. What is that word for stomach gurgling? Something with -ygmy...[ANSWER: Borborygmi! Onomatopoeia -- transliterated by the Greeks.]

2. Remember that old George Carlin routine about stomach gurling, from back in the early days was Carlin was sweet and talked about childhood? It's very funny.

3. On the saddest day of my life, I sat at a funeral for a 22-year-old woman. Next to me was her grandfather, whose innards were waterfalls, the worse case of stomach gurgling I'd ever heard. The forces of deepest sorrow and crazy hilarity were in a death struggle for dominion over my soul. At one point the old man apologized to me, even though he couldn't control it -- his body's absurd expression of grief.

4. What else belongs on this list I'm going to put on my blog? Why, the very fact that I'm in this condition making a list of things to put on my blog.