The most popular TV shows today appear to be sanitized to the point of banality, and they’ve been stripped of all humorous or controversial content. Nothing on American television is created for an IQ higher than 80, no matter how “good” it is.

Sometimes I’ll walk into a friend’s house and as far as I can tell the TV is blaring at extreme volume seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. No wonder they can’t concentrate on anything with all that background noise. Turn it off, for God’s sake!

I feel myself growing dumber whenever I turn on the TV. It makes me uncomfortable when I’m at someone’s home and they all sit down and insist I watch some moronic pabulum masquerading as ‘edgy’ comedy. “You’ll like this” they say. Ugh.

The only thing edgy about US TV is the sheer volume of all the vapid, annoying commercials.

Hey, look: I own a television. It’s not like I’m against TV. I like sports – all kinds of sports, especially motorsports – and my wife and I like watching movies from time to time. TV is good for stuff like that, no doubt.

But what really bothers me about watching television today is the number of commercials and the excruciating length of the breaks. It’s clear the networks have colluded as well because you can’t change channels to escape them anymore: all the channels actually coordinate their commercial breaks so they air at approximately the same time.

Maybe you haven’t noticed?

I’ve got video recordings from thirty years ago, and the commercial breaks are literally 30 seconds long; maybe three commercials at a time. Nowadays I turn on the tube and the ads sometimes run for 2 or 3 minutes – even during live sporting events! It’s an outrage. People are clearly used to it by now, though. I never hear any complaints.

I still insist on video-taping the shows I want to watch because I hate sitting through the breaks. Yes, that’s right: video tapes. Since the digital conversion you can’t record TV shows on DVD: everything is copyright protected. What a great innovation, right? VHS is the only way around that.

Americans today can’t even laugh at the same shit we used to laugh about forty years ago. TV Sitcoms like All In The Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and Chico and The Man tackled issues like race and class and poverty in a way that would surely offend the PC-police today. They weren’t great shows, frankly, but it was all we had: there were only like eight or nine channels available – but at least those issues were given lip service. Roots would probably be deemed too controversial today.

Men had monstrous sideburns back then and really long hair; blacks wore huge afros with afro combs sticking out the top. Women went around braless all the time[!] Even schoolteachers!* Until conservatives killed the ERA, we all had hope that maybe women might get paid the same as men.

And then the Christian Coalition took over in 1980 and turned America into the debased, backward, PC culture we have today. Homogenized, watered-down humor cleared by the Thought Police is all we have left.

TV was far more edgy and controversial in the 70s, frankly, back when SNL was funny and they could make drug references and poke fun at religion and racism and politics. Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase used the dreaded ‘N’ word in a skit to make a relevant point about racism in one of the very first episodes.

Later in the same episode Pryor did a routine where he played a character high on smack. It was funny.

In the years prior to the ‘Reagan Revolution’ you could show that kind of stuff on TV. The country was far more tolerant then.

A few years ago, the accidental exposure of one nipple on national television caused such an outcry that live TV broadcasts have been banned permanently in this country.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: what this country needs is a lot more nudity and a lot less violence.

‘Entertainment’ in the USA must appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to deliver the largest possible audience to corporate sponsors. That is the reality. An example: Seth Macfarlane. Not funny. I’m sorry to break this to you, America, but there’s nothing more pathetic than people who think they’ve got a great sense of humor when they clearly don’t have a clue. Family Guy was basically created for people who are too dumb to get The Simpsons. Not that the Simpsons didn’t jump the shark long ago, mind you. I stopped watching several years ago…but still…

David letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres: none of these people were EVER funny. If you laugh at anything they say you are one of those who mistakenly believes they have a sense of humor. Sorry.

One of the most provocative TV shows in the 70s used to be Saturday Night Live – in the early years, at least, pre-Dick Ebersol. And then it came back for a few years in the early 90s when the cast included Mike Myers, Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey and Chris Farley, among others…

But SNL hasn’t really cut it for at least twenty years. When you’re forced to remove all of the references to drugs, sex, religious and racial disparities all you’re left with is mindless pabulum. And that can only take you so far.

We also had SCTV, which was a blessing and far more consistently funny than SNL. The cast included John Candy, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis and Andrea Martin. But that was produced in Canada, of course.

When I was growing up we had a subscription to The National Lampoon, for chrissakes. Comedy was highly valued in my family and it became a guiding principle in my life. Life would be absolutely intolerable without a sense of humor.

Humor heals many wounds.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, originally broadcast in the late 1960s in Britain had more influence on my life than anything else I’ve seen on TV. The local L.A. PBS station carried it late at night on like a Thursday in the early seventies. That program had a profound effect on my sense of humor and the way I viewed the world.

Monty Python was highly intellectual yet at the same time irreverent and goofy and really stupid. And it made fun of everything: every race, creed and color. This was back in the late 60s on the BBC. They showed nudity 40-some odd years ago. In Prime Time!

Incredibly, the British public didn’t demand the program be taken off the air or that the producers be fired.

Hold on, Jason: are you saying that Britain in the late 60s was a more tolerant and progressive society than America today? Yep. That’s exactly what I’m saying. People on this side of the pond are far too easily offended, and when Americans get offended they get together and take action. They form committees and create Facebook campaigns. They write letters and protest and generally bitch and whine and moan until they get what they want. It’s the American way.

Thus, commercial interests demand that everything be watered down to the point of banality because some Jesus-loving housewife in Nebraska might be offended that one of the characters has a lisp.

Family oriented sit-coms, CSI cop shows; late night talk; lawyers, doctors; reality/infotainment. That’s all there is, folks: your entire entertainment spectrum broken down into six easily managed categories. Take it or leave it.

You can cram the most horrendous load of crap down their throats, and Americans will sit there and take it. And they’ll like it. Even otherwise intelligent people: like good little drones, Americans never get tired of the same old crap.

Americans sure as hell don’t watch documentaries any more. That’s for them commies who support PBS…

Some more examples of America’s retrogressing sense of humor:

Richard Pryor won a Grammy for That Nigger’s Crazy way back in 1974. Today the label would be facing hundreds of potential lawsuits for releasing an album with that title. Pryor followed it up with Bicentennial Nigger in `76. I remember listening to it one afternoon with my dear friends Harold and Miles – who happen to be black, BTW. It was hilarious! The brothers thought it was funny; white folks thought it was funny too, in those days. It was funny.

Blazing Saddles – released in 1975. Mel Brooks would be banished forever from Hollywood if he tried to make that film today. He made fun of Blacks, Jews, Indians…everybody. He used all kinds of bad, really Un-PC language, too.

Cheech & Chong: Need I say more? They made a career out of drug abuse. Somehow it was still funny.

George Carlin.

Sam Kinison

Bill Hicks.

The list goes on. These people are rolling over in their graves!

Like everything else, America’s collective sense of humor has regressed since the Reagan era. You can’t succeed in this country if you make fun of all the stuff that’s wrong with it. America has devolved into a corporate culture based on greed and mindless consumerism. Buying and selling stuff is what life’s all about in contemporary America.