And not just cause I was an Altar Boy. And no, I never did anything untoward with the host. I wouldn't dare.
And that's the G.D. point of comedy there, my son... but anyway. I don't have to write anything about it, because Kevin Baker took care of it in the National Post this weekend:
You may have read about the flap over The Altar Boy Gang, the pilot that aired without fanfare two Fridays ago and featured altar boys lacing Communion wafers with drugs. Some Catholics were upset. The Post published an editorial. Here is the fiendish bit: "Indeed, no Canadian should have to pay the CBC to make fun of, ignore or misreport their views." The slip from comedy ("make fun") to news reporting ("ignore or misreport") elides the difference between fiction writers and journalists...
Other objectors, too, wanted comedy writers to adopt the journalist's concern for accuracy and balance, and insisted cultural groups depicted in the CBC's fictional programs all be treated the same. When they are not, went the editorial, there's a double standard, "Gang being permitted to deride Catholic rituals, while the CBC hired an Islamic consultant to ensure that Little Mosque on the Prairie was in no way offensive to Muslims."
So in fact Little Mosque has armed people of other races, faiths and cultures. Whether there is an actual sensitivity consultant or the sensitivity consultant was a conceit released in a pre-emptive strike against offence-takers, we may learn in time. But if there was no consultant, no matter. Now
everybody wants one. There'll be a swarm of them. Comedy will be the victim...
What is sad, and ominous, about the furor over The Altar Boy Gang is that no one cared whether the sitcom was funny.
Amen. BTW, it was. No matter, though, right?
6 comments:
Half of me wants to make tsk-ing noises about Canada "catching up" to the evil that is U.S. censorship and the other half of me is cleaning off my keyboard after looking at the website for "Little Mosque on the Prairie." There is no way this would have graced the airwaves in the U.S. and it's a damn shame. (Can someone at CBC try pointing one signal a trifle south? Say, towards Oregon? So I can see this show?)
In my brief scan of Google, I can't find anything about "Altar Boy Gang" that isn't the IMDB entry or a news article about the controversy. (I only looked through three pages, though.) So I can't say how it sounds to me, as a non-and-never-been-Catholic. But having lived through some really ignorant portrayals of Wicca in popular television shows (no, "Charmed" was NOT about Wicca...) I say of the people who were offended by "Altar Boy Gang," "Juck 'me if they can't take a folk." If we'd all lighten up some and accept that there are humor to be found in nearly everything we'd live in a much happier world.
Michael Moore would be out of a job, though. And how is this a bad thing?
P.S. And if you saw the word "Wicca" there and thought to yourself, "Ah, another nutjob," then you may be a walking justification for the call for censorship you're decrying. I've been this way for close to thirty years. I'll let the American public have their "Sabrina the Teen Age Witch" if they'll let us have "Altar Boy Gang."
The Craft was pretty dead on, though.
Oh, for... And here I was pouting about another brilliant-sounding Canadian show I'd probably never get to see. *eyeroll*
The weird thing is that there's not exactly a shortage of off-color Catholic-centered comedy. Where have these people been? Or does it somehow stop being funny when you set it after Vatican II? Don't get it.
Miss Gypsy: Yupyupyup. "If you never laugh in Circle, you're doing it wrong." We all need to be reminded of that one, or the appropriate equivalent, once in a while.
Alex Epstein said...
The Craft was pretty dead on, though.
1. Huh? Dead on to what?
2. Movie, not tv. Different animal.
2. Movie, not tv. Different animal.
Yeah, but its blood still ends up on a pentagram in a graveyard with a bunch of stoned goth kids and a six pack...
"the craft" was just about as dead-on about wicca as "hackers" was about the internet.
but i assume you were being sarcastic...
the problem is, a show about regular old catholics is gonna be boring. that's why there's shows like "the sopranos" and "altar boys"--just like a show about regular "wiccans" is gonna be boring, since there's nothing really magical about them. also, most wiccans don't call themselves witches, so it's too totally different things.
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