This is funny?

As I approach Old Fogey-dom, rants become necessary when I become aware of things my lack of television has protected me from seeing. Today's transcription job was 90 minutes of a so-callled comedian - a stand-up guy with, I take it, a considerable reputation and a certain following. I was immediately offended because he spent the first 30 minutes insulting almost every ethnic group, [making a certain amount of fun of the "youth" of his own group] Of course every topic was larded heavily with sexual references. I was offended especially for the gay community but then he got into politics and showed the usual caliber of old idiocies by saying a woman president is a bad idea because "every 18 days she'll go nuts." Using PMT is not offensive in itself, it's just dumb but when he apparently has never heard of menopause ... that's ignorance.

Ignorance was the foundation for all the humor -- plus calling every woman "bitch". Once he had attacked every one, I think, except Australian aborigines [probably only because he doesn't konw they exist] he based the rest of his schtick around sex -- as graphically acted out as a fully clothed person can, and going into permutations I thought were beyond what is talked about in public places. Now and then the guy offered some fairly sentimental platitude about how divorce is hard on kids or how you have to communicate in a relationship, but as soon as he got almost to something logical he veered into some kind of sexual rap. 80% of the so called humor in the 90 minutes was centered on the crotch; the rest was aggressiveness to everyone different than himself.

This is called "entertainment" and a room full of people were laughing [although I know they are cued well before a performance] but presumably people at home will watch this thinking they're being entertained. Over and over and over, whether it's "humor" or what passes for news or sitcoms, whenever I'm exposed to television I'm glad I have shelves of boooks to read and have chosen ones that were written by serious people attempting to pratice a craft that calls for skill, thought, emotion, rationality and, often, story telling ability -- that's what I call entertainment.