Please, PLEASE...if you're a sitcome writer, take this to writers' room and POST IT to remind your fellow hacks that there are real audience members...not the canned fraudience...who want to laugh at something original, authentic, and FUNNY!! WGA should adopt your ratings, goddess Heather.

Re: your caption on the front page, it's Maz Jobrani, not Max

Fat-ass-unattractive husband married to thin and attractive wife.

*Would Roseanne Barr's character in Roseanne ever be paired with Neil Patrick Harris, Charlie Sheen or Ray Ramano? I think not.

They remind me of all those emotion faces that psychologists used to use on kids in the 1970s. Kudos on going to so much trouble to set a whole new comedy-quality scale.

That said, I have a couple of nits to pick: First a writing complaint. I hate when people use "think" as a self-contained verb (in your article it was "Think Woody Allen") to cite an example. It's trendy nonsense that needs to be edited out of all articles. Please, oh great Salon editor who might be reading this, re-think (note: "re-think" is exempt) this abuse of an otherwise perfectly serviceable verb. The correct usage is "think of," or better yet, you could be a creative writer and use a non-trendy verb of your own choosing.

My pet peeve out of the way, the other gripe I have with Heather's article is the way she lumps certain behaviors into funny/not-funny categories. I get what you're doing, but would it kill you to acknowledge that humor isn't reducible to type, but rather to quality? "Dumb & Dumber," for example, is a mostly slapstick, lowbrow film that makes me laugh every time I see it. Adam Sandler movies can't make me break a smile.

The same goes for your claim that "obsessive-compulsive traits" are always groaners. The hell they are. Tony Randall's "Odd Couple" persona was refined to the point of making Jack Lemmon's portrayal seem sour in comparison. Tony Shalhoub's dirt-phobic "Monk" tics aren't always inspired, but he's such a likable actor that the joke never gets old.

How the material is shaped and executed matters -- whether that material is bronze or Silly Putty.

Though it's Family Guy, not The Family Guy.

The second season was even better than the first in my opinion, and that's saying something. Those of us in America finally find out who Ronnie Corbett is! The first season DVDs just came out and I bought three copies to give away.

I could never get into The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm (I found the cringe-humor too draining and painful) but I love Extras.

Has Patti B not noticed that almost all of the husbands on TV are stupid?

There's a word for it when a one-note snarkmonkey like Heather Havrilesky goes after a show like the genuinely funny Knights of Prosperity for having repetitiously cutesy-poo oddball characters. Wait--it's on the tip of my tongue. There it comes. . . . The word is. . . .

She doesn't get the t-shirts, for fuck's sake. That is simply weak.

I watched the first episode because I find Donal Logue hilarious (and, God help me, I LOOOOOVE "Grounded for Life").

But I just couldn't get into it. The whole time I kept thinking that it would have been a cute idea for a TV movie, but an entire series? And with all due respect, Heather, there is most definitely a Talentless Hottie... playing the same exact role she played in that sitcom about the lady realtors (with Gail O'Grady and Nicole Sullivan) a couple of years back.

Actually, a more appropriate title for her column would be "Kiss My Painted Toenails, Scum, and Get Me My ****ing Scotch," but that's kind of long. What's more amazing is that someone with no sense of humor would dare to critique humor and rank it on some kind of absolute scale.

It is a freshman mistake to say "That's not funny." A sophamore would eventually learn to say "That's not funny to me." A senior would say "That's not funny very often to me." (Those are high school classes, not college, by the way.) For instance, I, too, don't find very much that's funny in The Knights of Prosperity, but every once in a while the writers or actors come up with some bit of business that actually works.

One of my few joys is watching a group of improv comedians trying to wring comedy out of audience suggestions. They aren't paid much; they work for Disney. They have the unenviable task of (a) being funny (b) for an audience of drunks (c) while still keeping close to Disney standards of decency and political correctness. They walk that tightrope seven nights a week, four or five shows a night. And sometimes they fall off. Sometimes the muse doesn't visit the club, sometimes the audience is lousy, sometimes a drunk or some catastrophic national news makes everything unfunny. Watching them work, despite all these pitfalls and problems, are profiles in courage that not even JFK's ghostwriters could match. And they succeed more often than mortal humans should be allowed.

As annoying as I find Jim Belushi on According to Jim,, I give him credit for keeping trying. He may only be walking in the big, fat footsteps of Jackie Gleason, but sometimes he surprises with some unique piece of business. And for all the episodes and even seasons that Roseanne's sitcom went off the rails, the train did arrive at a destination, and more honor and more interesting side trips than, say, The Cosby Show. Anybody who even tries to be funny deserves respect, and if it doesn't work, at the very least sympathy. But perhaps it's asking Havrilesky too much to have sympathy for anyone, especially before she gets her scotch.

I don't usually agree with HH's opinions about television (for example how she didn't like "Invasion" versus liking "Lost" so much -- "Invasion" was a lost treasure of television, which was why it got axed so quickly), but I hope she stays with the faces rating system for sitcoms, or shitcoms, as I usually call'em these days. The pain-inducing shituations they come up with are nicely rendered by those faces.

What I never get is how the crappiness of a show is so often inversely proportional to its duration on television. I call it "The War at Home" effect.