Today is my 33rd birthday. I chose to keep it calm, and stay in. Well, it wasn’t entirely my choice. I needed to do my laundry (the machines were in use yesterday…) so I stayed in and worked on my web site while the loads were going. I pretty much treated it like any other Sunday. It must be a sign of age to not want to “whoop it up” for the anniversary of my entrance to this world. Now, something else I did today was to finally watch Banzai on FOX. I had seen a little bit of this program on a tape I have from a UK broadcast. Oddly enough (or not) it has come under fire from Asian American groups. They consider it as demeaning to Asian Americans – despite the Asians in the program actually being English. They never had a problem with the show in the UK, where they realize that it’s a parody of a Japanese game show where silly things happen (have you seen some of the actual game shows out of Japan!)
This also reminds me of another very funny UK export, that is no longer being shown in the US because some Americans just didn’t get it (or have a sense of humor…) I am referring to Dave Allen at Large. Dave is A very funny Irishman who would sit on a stool and tell jokes (with a drink in one hand, and a cigarette in the other – the Seventies were marvelous…) Comedians often make fun of what they know, and what Dave knew was Catholicism.
Unfortunately in the United States, there are vocal groups of people that don’t believe religion is anything to joke about. These people pestered their PBS stations (and probably their congressional representative) about how offended they were, and many also sent harsh letters to Mr. Allen himself. Well, Dave apparently didn’t like this one bit. So once the distribution contract in the U.S. expired, he decided to never let it air over here again…
So once again good fun entertainment could be banned in the U.S. because of a vocal-minority (“Prace your bet now!”)
In the immortal words of Dave Allen: “Good night, and may your god go with you.”
2003-07-27