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I have to admit that I'm no South Park Fan -- what little I've seen wasn't that funny to me.... But Team America had falling out the seats and singing "America! F***, YEAH!" all the way home. I plan to by the uncut DVT version Very Soon.

I guess, though, I'm more of a Benny Hill Republican, a bawdy Scottish folk songs/Robert Burns Republican, a Monty Python Republican (hmmm....I'm starting to sound a touch British here), an Airplane! Republican, a Whose Line is It Anyway? (American version) Republican, and, perhaps above all, a Marxist Republican (of the Grouchoist/Harpoist tendency).

I have to admit that I'm no South Park Fan -- what little I've seen wasn't that funny to me.... But Team America had falling out the seats and singing "America! F***, YEAH!" all the way home. I plan to by the uncut DVT version Very Soon. I guess, though, I'm more of a Benny Hill Republican, a bawdy Scottish folk songs/Robert Burns Republican, a Monty Python Republican (hmmm....I'm starting to sound a touch British here), an Airplane! Republican, a Whose Line is It Anyway? (American version) Republican, and, perhaps above all, a Marxist Republican (of the Grouchoist/Harpoist tendency).

We share the same taste in entertainment.

You've got a great list of funny stuff --I'd just take exception to Benny Hill, who doesn't have the talent of Groucho Marx's toenail-- and we haven't seen Team America.

(I'm such a Marx Brothers fan, my screenname here was briefly 'Dr. Hackenbush' --but too many FReepers thought I was claiming to be a medical doctor. So I dropped it.)

Monty Python reruns and movies are a little problematic, so we waited with those until the kids were older. Same with Airplane and 'Whose Line is it Anyway?' (for the record, we like the Brit version better).

The beauty of the Marx brothers' movies is that you can sit there and watch them with your children, and you're all laughing your heads off. The innuendo is so brilliantly subtle, your little kids don't even notice it while they're howling over the slapstick.

Not so with the First Lady's shtick the other night. The sexual innuendo of some of those jokes could hardly have been more heavy handed -- no matter how many FReepers absurdly claim their innocence (and our 'dirty-mindedness').

And this is where I think a lot of the problem lies. She's the First Lady, for Pete's sake! Is sexual innuendo ever appropriate for a First Lady? (Can we even imagine debating this question only a few years ago?)

Here we had this lovely and gracious looking woman, conservatively coiffed and clad in ethereal yellow chiffon -- and suddenly out of her mouth came pouring jokes about husbandly sexual inadequacy, suburban fornication, male strippers wearing thongs, and the milking of male horses. Not while we expected while we sat there with our children!

Was the laughter at those jokes the kind of shocked laughter you used to see in audiences watching a Lenny Bruce routine forty years ago? (Yes, there were some great clean jokes in Laura's act too, but nobody's paying attention to them.)