Mon, March 14, 2005
The Aristocrats—9:34 AM
Alert reader Brandon passed along this story from the New York Times:
The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told
(As always, if you need a free password to access the article, consider borrowing one from bugmenot.)
What starts out as a recount of how tasteless humor shattered the morbid stranglehold of September 11 turns into a nuanced evaluation of "indecency" in our country, and the (repeating) history of attempts to squelch it. He touches on HBO's brilliant Deadwood, Lynne Cheney, the Hays Production Code, and – of course – shitbag mouthpiece Ari Fleischer.
My frenzied reading list has taken me through the Hays years twice in the last month or two (once semi-fictionally, once historically) and each time I think, "He he! Another year or so and we'll be living through Hays Redux."
