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Open wide your ears and hearken unto us as we engage in a surprisingly serious discussion of The State of the Comedy.* On the table are such diverse topics as:

Judd Apatow: Why don’t you stop?
Wayans Brothers: Too many?
Satire: Where it go?
Stripes: Definitely pretty good

*The President shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Comedy, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.

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PZ Meyers, a Biologist from the University of Minnesota, Morris, recently tried to attend a screening of the Creationist film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but was himself expelled.

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So because of Kathy Griffin’s now infamous comments upon receiving her undeserved award, a lot of people are pretty outraged that someone would have the gall to downplay the importance of Jesus in everything that we do. At least one group of Christians has started a petition to get people to not be so sassy about Jesus, because we all know how effective petitiononline.com is and how seriously everyone takes it.

The petition reads:

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Every six months or so, amid all the ground the Christian moralists and religious conservatives of the world lose on the battlefronts of science, pop culture, education and morality itself–we get reminded of exactly how seriously people can take the Christian community.

Kathy Griffin just reminded us.

…

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I just have to take a moment to complain about South Park’s 2006 episode “Smug Alert!” which was re-airing last night.

The comedy is there. People farting into wine glasses, then greedily smelling the odor, is perhaps one of the best sight gags ever created. But the episode itself is, how can I say it, a little… smug.

Now, we’re all used to self-righteous South Park episodes which make fun of people who pretend to have “the answer” (mainly religious and Hollywood-types), while suggesting that their own “answer” is the best. But this episode may be the Creme de la Creme of smug anti-smugginess.

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According to a new poll, reading is at a major low-mark in modern America. Yes, even lower than it has traditionally been for the last fifty years. As a movie/entertainment-based website, which regularly promotes other media, I feel like we at Melted Reel should address this sad state of affairs.

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Season 10 of South Park was released on DVD Tuesday, and so I’d like to borrow the title of a two-part episode that season and talk to you about the Cartoon Wars. When people talk about TV cartoons nowadays, the discussion tends to focus on the “big three:” South Park, The Simpsons and Family Guy. I personally feel that King of the Hill is also of extremely high quality, but for one reason or another discussion usually excludes it in favor of the other three, and so that’s the tack I’ll take today. In the South Park episodes in question, Cartman takes it upon himself to use a controversial image of Mohammed on Family Guy to get not just that episode but the entire series taken off the air. He can’t stand Family Guy, you see, and when Kyle suggests that Cartman should like it, Cartman vows to kill him where he stands.

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone admit that the negative attitude about Family Guy portrayed in the show is a similar one to their own, albeit highly exaggerated. They don’t like Family Guy. Their two part episode “Cartoon Wars” repeatedly makes reference to the fact that the style of joke seen on Family Guy is completely irrelevant, unrelated to the nature of the characters, the situations, or the plot proper, and that this makes for a poorly-written, inferior kind of show. As a long-time fan of The Simpsons, I’ve listened over and over to all the episode commentaries yet available, and it’s clear from those that much of the creative staff of that show feels that Family Guy is a second-rate show as well. I say that, while it’s true that the jokes are usually just pure gags, with no connection to what’s going on in any individual episode, this does not make a less quality show. Fuck all that, Family Guy is perfectly fine.

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