The fearsome side of funny.

I don't get dirty comedy acts. That is to say I don't get filthy comedy acts, you know like the Friar's Club roasts. I don't really understand why audience find really crude, vulgar, angry sexual and scatalogical jokes so hysterically funny. I don't think I'm prudish, but maybe I am. But I'm not the least bit interested in anyone's else bathroom habits and and can't comprehend why people find other people's excrement in jokes so hilarious when they wouldn't want to be confronted with it in life. I just picked up a book from the Barnes and Noble bargain table. It was a collection of Friars' Club jokes, including lines from roasts. I must admit I read it. Not with prurient interest, but with surprise at just how crude the humor of today's comics can be. While some were amusing, most were kind of sickening and dehumanizing. The ones that were about urine, excrement, flatulence and incontinence suggested comics who were never properly toilet trained or so ashamed of their bodily functions that they need constant exorcisms. The ones that were about sex suggested a sophomoric naivete, a deep shame about eroticism, homophobia, or a pathetic inability to get it up. The saddest thing is that these are smart, funny, intelligent people, people I like, like: Joy Behar, BIll Maher, Lewis Black and Jerry Stiller. You wouldn't think they would need the cheap laugh, but apparently they do. Or perhaps they are victims of ever increasingly lowbrow audiences who no longer appreciate sharp humor, wit, or anything that requires an intelligent point of reference. What I hate most about this epidemic of bathroom and sex humor is it leaves you with the impression that, given the opportunity, everyone is ultimately animalistically boorish and any kind of elegance and class is strictly a charade. I don't think that's true, and I am sure that lots of comics have acts that, if not clean, are not angrily, bitterly, excessively and unnecessarily dirty. I just see as many of those acts any more.