Utter Filth

Apparently Two and a Half Men is filth and you shouldn't watch it.  So says one of its stars who has got religion.  To be frank, I can think of many other good reasons not to watch it.  That it is crap, for instance.  To be honest, I've not seen that many episodes of the (perhaps literally) offending series.  I never got into it - which is always a problem when coming into something part way through, it can take so long to work out what it is about, what the premise is, who the characters are, how they relate to each other and the plot and so on.  Which is why I quite like Big Bang Theory - the premise is simple: they're nerds, or geeks, or whatever.  That's it.  Highly intelligent nerds who can split atoms but can't handle everyday domestic situations.  Also, as very little ever fundamentally changes in terms of relationships, (other than whether Leonard and Penny are on or off), it's easy to pick up at any point during its run.  Unlike, say, How I Met Your Mother, where the ever changing relationships make it just too difficult to bother with for a casual viewer like me.

But getting back to the original point, sitcoms being filth and therefore somehow harmful, speaking personally, I like a bit of smut in a comedy.  Sophisticated wit and intellectual comic conceits are all very well, but there's no beating a damn good belly laugh, and I'm afraid that only smut and filth can provide this.  Be honest, when was the last time a supposedly sophisticated sitcom made you laugh out loud?  You know as well as I do that's why they had to put all that swearing into The Thick of It.  It wouldn't have raised a titter otherwise.  The same goes for Peep Show - it's the smutty bits we all watch it for.  I know that it is currently very fashionable in supposedly intellectual circles to decry smut in humour, but some of us see this for what it really is: middle class snobbery.  They can't stand the fact that we plebs can derive genuine pleasure from something as simple as a fart joke.  And let's not forget that humourous smut has a long and honourable tradition - since the days of Aristophanes it has been an integral part of satire.  There's something honest about filth - you know where you are with it, you know which bit you are meant to be laughing at, unlike many self-styled sophisticated comedies.