The Sunday supplement to the newspaper, Parade, published an interview with Carol Burnett on January 24, 2016. She is worthy of the honor given to her by the Screen Actors Guild. Airing on January 30th, she received their 52nd Life Achievement Award (9). As with most interviews, several questions were asked, including one that seems fairly typical: “What do you think of comedy today?” Bill Daily, who played Major Healey on I Dream of Jeannie, was asked a similar question awhile back, and he said he did not watch most of the newer comedies. Carol commented:
A lot of it I’m not thrilled with. Some of the comedy I’ve watched on television seems to have been written by teenage boys in the locker room. And now I’m sounding like an old fogey, but look at some of the sitcoms that were brilliant—All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart. Those hold up today, and there’s not one cheap laugh in them (8).
She described it with precision. The commercials for some of the popular sitcoms are so bad that one wonders why anyone would actually watch the program. For decades comedians proved that audiences would laugh at clean humor, but few today seem to think that wholesome and funny go together. Lines can still be written, according to Carol Burnett, that are clever “without being scatological or getting dirty” (9).
A Christian should be choosy when selecting entertainment. The biggest movie ever, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, has just become a worldwide hit without nudity and foul language. It didn’t need to appeal to the lowest element in mankind for cheap thrills. Evil characters do not need to utter a string of curse words—as if such would constitute entertainment. Every week, however, when one consults the movie guide, invariably the report is, “some nudity, some strong language.” Why? Quality entertainment can be accomplished without it; so one can only conclude that moviemakers include those scenes because they desire to do so—in which case Christians should refuse to trust them or pay money to finance them. Would Jesus take His apostles to a movie with cursing and nudity? Would He recommend or use toilet bowl “humor”? To answer, just reflect on all of the filthy language God chose to include in His Book and how many sexual jokes appear. Hmm.