Letters to the Editor
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Imus yet again
The basic ‘shtick’ with Imus is the unedited id loose in the real world. [Say anything!] Although he does edit himself, he is hardly perfect in that regard, and things over the line will out.
It’s humor! Sophomoric, crude and often very funny. Anyone who takes Imus and company seriously in such business is seriously courting loosing their grip. Exploiting stereotypes is part of the game. But Imus and his gang play it entirely in the spirit of ‘equal opportunity’.
It is one thing to cycle through a select group of stereotypes, however humorously, in pursuit of an agenda (racial, political, personal, whatever); it is quite another to present a whirling carnival burlesque of stereotypes, with no discernable agenda at all. The sheer idiocy of the stereotypes themselves is thrown into high relief. Jokes are what they are good for – the only thing they are good for. THAT is the humor heard day in and day out on ‘Imus in the Morning’. It has been on the air, accepted and appreciated, by a wide audience for over thirty years. If it is all so egregiously offensive, how could that have happened? I suggest it is because most were seeing it as I have proposed: sophomoric, rude, crude, stereotype exploiting, and - often enough – very funny. Face it, this is a well-neigh universal ‘guilty pleasure’ of the human race. One imagines the people of Cave A yukked it up over the ‘shortcomings’ of the people in Cave B, and vice versa.
There is more to be said, and the above with MUCH else can be found on Joan Walsh's bolg on pages 28 and 29 ('In 3 Posts') following her 'Firing Imus was the Right Thing' posting from April 11, 2007.