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Galliano is even more irrelevant than Gibson. Yes, he said horrible things, but at the end of the day it's still talk. As far as I know it was a single episode of him acting more out of shock value more than anything, as nothing in his actions before or since has suggested genuine anti-semitic beliefs (unless he has been donating to antisemitic groups or something that I'm not aware of). Let me say that I'm not denying what he did was wrong, but it's not in the same league as domestic violence. I would be much more willing to forgive him and give him a second chance than I would with Brown( or Gibson or Sheen for that matter). Now Charlie Sheen I'll give you, and a case could be made that the media has gone too easy on him. But that certainly doesn't make me feel ANY sympathy for Chris Brown. I think we are fundamentally talking about different things here. You're saying that Brown's behavior doesn't excuse other assholes, and I'm not saying it does. What I'm saying is, Chris Brown is a piece of shit who deserves all the hate he gets and more. The fact that other assholes are getting less hate than him doesn't make Chris Brown any less of an asshole. Maybe there are other white people like Charlie Sheen that we should be harder on, fine. I'm not going to deny that. But going easier on Chris Brown isn't helping anything. We should be giving more shit to Charlie Sheen AND Chris Brown as far as I'm concerned.

No, I'm going to say that this is totally different. Chris Brown has repeatedly continued to do all sorts of terrible shit, in public. Throwing a temper tantrum and breaking windows, getting in bar fights, getting that creepy neck tattoo... the list goes on and on. On top of that, he has stayed in the public eye, continuing to make records that sell millions of copies. Gibson, on the other hand, has tried to keep a low profile since his last incident. And his career has pretty much been in the toilet. I am positive that if Gibson did something again that was batshit insane the media would be all over him. But the story on Gibson now is just depressing, and in a boring way.

You know, people fixating on Chris Brown MAY have something to do with his being black, but he still deserves it as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, fine, there may be other white assholes who don't get as much hatred as they deserve, but that doesn't make Chris Brown a better person in any way. So fuck Chris Brown. The only thing that makes me hesitate is that he does seem to enjoy being hated. He certainly is profiting off of it--all the media attention just keeps him in the public eye, which leads to more records being sold.

Actually, I think that assuming white people to be bad at basketball is pretty racist, in the sense that has been discussed before. The whole thing about white people being uptight, "uncool" leaders of the establishment, while black people are "cool" and athletic.

I meant it as a joke, but clearly it didn't come out the way I intended. It's easy to make mistakes with things like tone if you're not careful, and I probably shouldn't have said something like this in the context of an internet forum. NEW NO-NO: If I say something that makes people feel uncomfortable, then I'm gonna apologize for it.

Damn you Tig! First Sarah Silverman, and now Sascha. Are you intentionally bringing in your hottest female guests to talk about sexual attraction, just to get us hetero male (and lesbian!) listeners all hot and bothered? If you are, it's working. In all seriousness, though, I am so looking forward to listening to this one. And for the record, Sascha would be a delight to listen to even if she didn't look like such a "hottie" in her picture.

I have noticed this too. In fact, it goes beyond characters--so often, I'll see people comment "I can't stand _____'s voice" when they're talking about, say, Doug Loves Movies or Who Charted? The thing is, when people complain about men's voices, it's always a thing where I kind of felt the same thing while listening myself. Whereas often, with female comedians, it will be someone that I thought had just a normal female voice, but people are complaining about how "annoying" the voice was. So clearly there is a bias somewhere, and I don't think it's that I am biased in favor of females. For the record, I like Nancy. I thought she was a lot funnier this time--Kristen was a great foil to her character.

I think it's pretty much foregone that Wipeout and Time Bobby will be number 1 and 2. It's just a question of what order. I also expect New No Nos and Out of Bleeps to be in the top 5. Personally, I don't want to see Farts & Pro 2 in the top 5... it was decent enough, but it was pretty much the exact same thing as before, with nothing really new or interesting. Seems likely, though--I think a lot of what makes the difference between making top 10 and not making it is being easy to remember. I generally like having the title being a one-off random funny line from the show (in the Mr. Show Tradition) but it can make it very hard to remember what an episode is when you look at it later. People look at a long list of episode titles, and most of them don't jog their memory, so they just vote for ones they kinda liked that jump out at them. Or they vote for episodes with guest stars that they liked, as in the Pally/Sandgerg episode. It also probably got a bump from Sandberg fans who don't listen to the show regularly.

This podcast is easily one of the 10 best things Earwolf humanity has done in 2012.

For the record, I actually like the AV Club, and I even like podmass. They have introduced me to a number of podcasts that I probably wouldn't have found out about otherwise, and they serve as a pretty good reference point for many of the podcasts that I watch semi-regularly. I might see, for example, that the show has a really good guest or segment that makes it a must-download. And it's one of the only places I've seen with coverage/discussion of podcasts as a general media. The other ones I've seen are either specific to a certain small area (like this site) or just a big "laundry list" of podcasts that is a pain in the ass to sift through for the stuff I want to read about. I think there's a lot of room for improvement (with the format especially) but overall I consider it a good thing. But I do find it funny when a reviewer will give a bizarre, outlier review to something because of one little point that bothered them. I doubt it will happen this week, though.

This week, on the AV Club: THE REST Comedy Bang Bang #191: 2012 Holiday Spectacular: Harris Wittels, Paul Rust, Paul F. Tompkins Although this week's episode got off to a strong start, a tasteless conversation about slitting children's throats turned the whole listening experience sour in light of recent events.

They were mostly focusing on the rockabilly / 50s nostalgia SCENE rather than the music itself. The point is that a lot of the nostalgia for that era has some racist connotations, because saying you want to return to that period is basically saying you want to return to a time when segregation was in full effect. Now, I'm sure that very few of them expressly want to bring back segregation, but I think a lot of them do take a revisionist view of the period that whitewashes things a lot. The people who most enjoyed the 50s were a relatively small and privileged group, while for nonwhite America the 50s weren't necessarily a fun time that people want to return to. A lot of the 50s nostalgia tends to ignore/deny this. Even if you do enjoy things from the period, I think it's important to temper that with awareness that it was hardly a utopia that we should want to return to. One thing though, is that I think that a lot of people (not just Andrew of course) go too far with that mentality, and take a view that is very revisionist in the other direction. I'm not denying that overall things are much better when it comes to racism, and no one in their right mind should think society as a whole would be better off if we returned to that. But sometimes it gets treated like this dark age which totally sucked for EVERYBODY except white people. To the point where people say that only white people could ever enjoy even traveling back in time to VISIT earlier time periods because racism made everything so terrible. In fact, I would say this can lead to a reductionist view of the nonwhite world. To take an example: yeah, things are definitely better off for black people OVERALL compared to the pre-civil rights era. But it's not like black people were just living in misery all that time. In the rockabilly era that we mentioned, you had black artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard that were absolutely smoking hot in popularity, and there were of course plenty of black teenagers who loved the music. Let's not forget that Motown was basically born out of rockabilly and rhythm & soul music. Not to mention the jazz and blues scenes in the big American cities, going back to the turn of the century. In fact, I think it would be pretty damn cool, if you were a black person, to go back in time to the 1920s and experience the Harlem Rennaissance. Of course I can't speak for black people, but I have a feeling that it would be MORE reductionist to assume they would have nothing to enjoy from these eras.

In this caller's defense, to me it sounds like a situation where he knows it's racist, but maybe for some reason has people trying to tell him it's not. Also, I've found a certain amount of people who use the term "Jap" as an abbreviation for "Japanese" with no knowledge of the racist connotations. Apparently they just happened to use it in writing, unaware of the racist connotations. Which is fine, but a lot of time they'll get all defensive and be like "Why should I stop using it?" when you tell them how racist the term is. I mean, if you used the word not knowing it's racist, that's no big deal. As long as you stop using it as soon as you find out. But I definitely don't get when people use a racist/homophobic/whatever term not knowing what it means, then refuse to stop using it when they find out.

When I refreshed the front page and saw Todd's face looking at me, I literally squealed "Tooooooddddd!" in delight. I was giddy, God help me. Giddy. Can't wait to listen.

I remember that back in the 90s they used to have a commercial for Chicago's "Lite" music station 93.9 where it was just this voiceover woman saying how she wishes there was a station "for her." It was just a shot of a radio, with hands putting music in and out based on what the voiceover was saying. I specifically remember a moment where the voice goes "and none of that RAP stuff," and the hands pulled a gold chain out of the radio. So racist. I think excluding rap kind of made sense in the early 90s, when rap was more distinct from other genres of music. Even the biggest pop rap hits of the time like "U Can't Touch This" and "Ice Ice Baby" are very different from the stuff that was considered pure pop at the time, like Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey. But these days it's so integrated into other styles, it's hard to think of a reason to exclude it other than racism. I do kind of get it, though. When I say "racism" I'm referring to a very indirect kind of racism. None of the people involved probably think they're excluding minorities. But it's all about the stations bending over backwards to make sure the white listeners are never, ever even taken slightly out of their comfort zones. And when they even go out of their way to say, "No rap," it just makes it worse.

I still don'tquite get it, because it doesn't seem that way to me at all--more like, it's just separating the world into two parts: the west (occidental) and the east (oriental). And it still doesn't make sense as an explanation to why it's offensive, because like Andrew said most people have no problem with it being applied to objects like rugs, so... To me that just sounds like something people made up after the fact, because they had to rationalize being offended by a term that originally was intended in an inoffensive manner. Which they don't, any more than black people need to rationalize being bothered by the term "colored." I have to say one thing that really bothered me in the podcast, and I forgot to mention. When they were going on about how Tyler Perry is basically the black Adam Sandler, and if you're making fun of Tyler Perry's movies you should also be making fun of Happy Madison stuff. First of all, doesn't everyone already know this? And second of all, where are Andrew and Dave hanging around that all the white people make fun of Tyler Perry movies but not Adam Sandler movies? I see people making fun of Happy Madison movies everywhere I go. Man, last year people were hating on Bucky Larson and Jack and Jill non-stop. I think Tyler Perry movies actually get made fun of less, because they aren't on white people's radar as much.

I see the word "oriental" as being a lot like the word "colored" for black people. Originally that was just a common, inoffensive way to refer to people of that ethnicity, but it has fallen out of fashion. So now saying the word rings as offensive to people not because people go out of their way to use the word in a racist way, but because it reminds people of a time when people were more racist. So personally my attitude is, if you're an old person then it's probably not coming from a particularly racist place. While it's cool if you don't use it, I don't really have a problem with it if you do. But if you're young, you should definitely know better. Whether it's offensive or not is MAYBE debatable, but what's not debatable is that using the term makes you sound like an old person. So just knock it off.

Because white people aren't in danger of dwindling down to nothing? A lot of the native American tribes are so few in numbers that identity is extremely important to them. Also there is the fact that many of them have been granted quasi-independent status within the US, so it seems logical that you would have an ID card if you were from there, just like any country has its own ID card(s). The one thing that gets me, is Markos' post about wanting to be called "indigenous." This is the first time I've ever heard of someone claiming that the term is somehow preferable to "Native American." Now given, I am white, but in things I have read and people I have talked to, it usually seems split about 50/50 between wanting to be called "Native American" and wanting to be called "American Indian." The point about how you should call them by their tribal name, however, is totally spot on. I have made it a point to do that, and in general you should avoid using the general terms when you are referring to an individual person whenever possible.

I literally applauded at the end of the freestyle rap. If anyone had been around I'm sure I would have looked like a crazy person. Also, BRING BACK SNAGGLEPUSS!

Another little issue: when you put your mouse over the "SHOWS" button, a menu of all the shows automatically rolls out underneath. That's good. Unfortunately, the list is very long and goes below the bottom of my screen. That's bad. And now the number of shows has increased to the point where almost half the shows are off the screen. There has to be a way to make it so that the menu will adjust to screens better, maybe changing into 2 or 3 columns as needed. Hope I don't sound too negative--I'm just trying to be helpful!

I just want to chime in that once a week is better, and PFT is awesome as always. P.S. Podcast is also awesome.

My favorite Stitches is the one where he finds two tall stacks of bones right next to each other that topple, and then he looks at the camera with a tear in his eye and says "Never forget." I was amazed at how a simple little strip could be so poignant and touching.

How could you forget Fortunately / Unfortunately?

Yes, and this is one of the things I like. I think part of the reason is to make this site more friendly to people on tablets and smartphones, which is totally a good idea. They just need to work a few kinks out. And again, I totally get that part of the reason is because they're trying to branch out beyond comedy, but since comedy still makes up a vast majority, they need to work out how to make that work in the interim. Because once they do increase podcasts in other genres, that's only going to make it so even fewer things are being shown on the front page. It's not an easy thing by any means, because they need to make all their content easily available and navigable.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but why are we calling anti-French sentiment racism? Is "French-speaking" a race now? I'm just saying, there are other types of bigotry besides racism...