The Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show, 3/8/12

77 PSAs, especially those? If anything is ever going to chase Rush Limbaugh’s audience away, it’d be that.

The Right attacked Bill Maher, and created enough of a stink that ABC declined to renew Maher’s contract, back in ’02 for (and this is what the Right wants everyone to forget) agreeing with Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative who didn’t miss a single payment of wingnut welfare for his comments.

Chez, I’m willing to cut comedians some slack, too. The problem I have with Gilbert Gottfried, Tracy Morgan, Michael Richards and others who crossed the line of decency—and got reamed for it—is that what they said wasn’t funny or insightful. If you’re going to say something incendiary or blatantly offensive, you damn’ well better have a good reason to do so. (Lenny Bruce and George Carlin used profanity, yes, but they did so very deliberately in service of a larger point.) More to the point, if you’re going to use deliberately offensive language and your joke/commentary/intellectual masturbation/whatever goes horribly awry, take your lumps and do not try to hide behind the “I’m only an entertainer” excuse.

Bob, Arizona has been a hotbed of lunacy for much longer than you give the state credit for. I drove through Kingman in 2000 and the number of Steve Forbes for President signs was astonishing. With all due apologies to IrishGrrrl and other Arizonan readers, the state went mad long, long ago.

The Hulk Hogan Sex Tape. Thanks, guys. I will never have an erection ever again in my life. Bastards.

“Hubbub” is a perfectly spiffing word, Robert. Do you answer the telephone—as Alexander Graham Bell suggested—with “Ahoy hoy!”? (No, the writers of The Simpsons didn’t make that up.)

Good show, as always. (If you don’t mind me asking, what do the show’s ratings look like?)

–alopecia