BECAUSE ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE...:

Sugar, spice, everything not so nice: Sarah Silverman goes to bat on the boys' turf. In her manly way (Paul Brownfield, February 4, 2007, LA Times)

MOST everybody's show on Comedy Central starts out as an adolescent male lark and never grows beyond those first jokes. Taken together, recent series like "Mind of Mencia," "Crank Yankers," David Spade's "The Showbiz Show," Dave Attell's "Insomniac" are gooney versions of the more buttoned-down comedy of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Stewart and Colbert clean up nice, but they're still a part of that figurative grammar school quad where the boys are passing around a girl's pilfered tampon like it's some kind of torch. Suspect everybody, trust no one. Particularly Chappelle and the "South Park" twins.

Comedy Central began in 1990, the merger of fledgling cable networks -- one called the Comedy Channel, the other called Ha!. Today the network has become Heh -- that guttural noise 12-year-old boys make at one another, particularly when in groups.

Other than Amy Sedaris, whose high-school parody "Strangers With Candy" ran on Comedy Central in 1999 and 2000, no female has managed to break the code of the quad. True, men dominate network sitcoms, but should a cable network fast approaching its 20th year as a haven for all things comedic still be looking to break its first female star?

Sarah Silverman is not a man, although she often plays one in her comedy.

...and conservatism is male.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 4, 2007 9:24 AM