by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/06/24 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/06/24/8640204.aspx
If you don't watch or at least want to watch Lewis Black's Root of All Evil, you can probably skip this blog (and come to think of it, you may want to skip this Blog in that case, as well!)...
Lewis Black is incredibly funny. He really is.
So far his show has put the following head-to-head:
Anyway, he was on the Opie and Andrew show at the beginning of this month, and mentioned that they had put the kibosh on two specific episode ideas:
Now I can sort of understand the first one a little (the ruling apparently came from the Comedy Central lawyers), given how aggressive the Scientology lawyers have proven to be over the years (plus the fact that despite some bad things about Disney this particular match-up does feel to me perhaps a bit more one-sided than a lot of the previous ones).
But the Scientologists have survived South Park, and Comedy Central has re-run the episode lampooning them since. So perhaps the legal department at Comedy Central is being a little paranoid here.
Nixing the Marriage vs. Death idea is a little screwier -- does this seem like the kind of show that attracts the viewers who so adamantly favor marriage that it will affect ratings?
I mean, I believe half of the advocates who have been on the show are actually married, and although it is true that none of them have died (that would make for a much shorter show!), it seems like a huge assumption that it would be anything more than comedy and satire and entertainment.
Maybe they just thought it wouldn't be funny.
But there isn't much you put people like Patton Oswalt and the other advocates on that wouldn't be really funny, if you know what I mean.
Just imagine the guest spots with famous people talking about how much death can slow down a career -- with the counterclaim being that Elvis seems much more active in sighting since his death (if anything his touring schedule is more active now!).
Or imagine the scandalous claim that there should be a mistrial given the well-known fact that marriage is death, making all of the proceedings a huge conflict of interest!
I think both episodes would have been pretty funny, and I would have watched them.
Oh well, the new season will start on July 30th, and even what the lawyers don't reject can quite entertaining!
This blog brought to you by ☺ (U+263a, aka WHITE SMILING FACE)
John Cowan on 24 Jun 2008 10:37 AM:
Just try'n'remember that when Dick the Butcher says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers", he's (a) talking utopia, and (b) he's a bad guy, if a funny bad guy. See Seth Finkelstein's excellent article at http://www.spectacle.org/797/finkel.html .
Michael S. Kaplan on 24 Jun 2008 11:45 AM:
That reminds me of a Heinlein reference (Number of the Beast, I think?), that talked about "The Year They Hanged the Lawyers"....