If you're tired of conspiracy theories than you might as well go sit on a fudgesickle, 'cause I got one that will really flake your toenails.

Once upon a time, and a fairly good time it was, Wayne and Schuster did a skit about being a TV addict. Tho it was a corny bit even then, many a habitual tubesucker has discovered that TV withdrawal is a reality, what with having to back up from what sundry and all have agreed has been the most abysmal TV season in the history of TV and seasons (the seasons having multiplied from one to 3.5 per year, an indication of just how abysmal things have become). But let The Monte -fuscos and Big Eddie rest — the good news is that in dimmer days those shows probably would have caught on (remember Gilligan's Island? And even more cogent is the original Dick Van Dyke Show whose once fresh format, now seen in endless rerun, seems embarassingly naive) while the bad news consists of the shows that have been left on. Crime is still an adventure (especially smack dealing and rape) and relevance is still a series of bad punchlines.

It's the bad punchlines that tipped me off to the conspiracy. Have you ever stopped to consider why you consider a particular show funny? With few exceptions (parts of M *A *S *H and parts of The Mary Tyler Moore Show are all that come to mind) it isn't the quality of the humor — next time you're watching your fave sitcom notice that the majority of the yuks are centered around two or more people insulting each other which is about as inventive and relevant (andfunny)as the inflated pig bladder of the ancient Greeks or Pigmeat Markham for that matter. Still and all these shows are funny despite the crusty oneliners and the reshuffling of situations numbers one through seven. I feel they're funny, apparently sane people are always telling me that they feel these shows are funny.. .which means the shows feel funny even if we stop and think and realize that they're not. And that raises the question that opens the door that brings the light that — anyway, why is it that we are capable of thinking that something is not funny and yet feel that it is?

Ney Betty, houjdja like me ta shake up yciur mouth?

...coxcombs in lime jello, then guard the door till dinner/

...it includes these scenes. Vieiuer discretion is advised.

Doesn't your dog deserve Elbo? Dont you wish everybody did?

Mainly because thinking and TV don't mix and I don't mean that as a paraphrasing of the old TV is aimed at 12 year olds so it's a boob tube/idiot box concept which isn't true anyway. Something more insidious is going on. In a not very recent issue of Saturday Review, in an article entitled "The Intellectual In Videoland," one Douglass Carter pointed out that "thinking people are left-brain in development... yet TV, we are informed, appeals mainly to the right hemisphere of the brain, which controls appositional — that is, non-sequential, non-analytic — thought.''That solves part of the mystery. I've had the experience of doing practically nothing but watch TV for two days and found that by the second day I was laughing out loud at inane game show capers and the creaky machinations of the relevance sitcoms (some people's breaking point comes much faster, particularly if they spend the day doing work from which they feel alienated — be it white collar cog work or blue collar repetition, after eight hours then you must come home with the right hemisphere of your brain fairly humming). Conversely I've had the experience of having about five hours of conversation concerning both ideas and feelings and then turning on the tube and finding myself literally disgusted by what I was previously chortling over.

So TV's a drug, you already know that no doubt, perhaps a long slow lobotomy, but why belabor the point. More important is why are we doing this to ourselves? The answer is so obvious — we aren't, somebody else is. Enter the conspiracy theory.

Here's the scenario (let's set it on the stoop and see if the cat laps it up): We are being rendered unable to effectively perceive reality1 by an alien consciousness so devious as to be almost beyond conception! Shades of Invasion of The Body Snatchers — our very humanity is being drained ^,s we munch on these little half hour sugar coated cookies of mulch and listlessly watch the grim dramas of life be depicted as spirited games of good vs. evil. In short, we're being set up. Already made half lame by our daily encounters with a world whose main function is to divide and conquer our capacity for thought and feeling, our atrophic condition is being further nourished by these unspeakable forces so that when the time, comes for them to take over we won't babble helplessly, we won't even whine. We simply won't care.

TURN TO PAGE 82.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 73.

Or. That's just the sort of textbook fantasy that someone might believe if they were prone to the obsessions resulting from the more extreme forms of paronoia...and watching a lot of TV can make you just that crazy. I know.