It's kind of the same thing, really. Trolls decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet by posting deliberate nonsense. Conspiracy theorists muddle the waters, not only by making absurd (i.e. non-deliberately nonsensical) claims, but by attacking the rational underpinnings that people use to determine the value…

Yeah… and I don't know why it bothers me more about O'Neal (et al.) than it bothers me about, say, some rappers. Perhaps the lack of music makes it harder to ignore. Perhaps I feel more protective of comedy.

I don't know whether to laugh because you're being funny, or whether to laugh because I got myself into an argument with a genuine crazy person. Maybe there's some conspiracy to keep context cues off the Internet.

Yeah, but he also believed that Kennedy bullshit. Like, really believed it, obsessed over it, made a conscious choice to believe it. Aliens. Etc. Stuff you'd have to be on drugs to take seriously. Which… well.

To me, O'Neal's rampant, hideous misogyny completely obscures whatever good qualities he might theoretically have possessed. The man was a dick on stage and off stage.

I consider subscribing to conspiracy theory — which, when you get down to it, was half of the underpinning of Hicks' work (the other half being macho bullshit mythology, which he apparently was able to swallow whole) — a form of whining. Or maybe "whining" isn't the right word.

Well, I've seen Bill Hicks, and I've seen George Carlin. Maybe some other comedians had interesting insights about politics.

For what it's worth, I haven't gotten a single bit of "pandering to the fans" out of anything I've actually seen on set.

And how many of those didn't have new ideas, pray tell?

But I feel like I've probably already seen the second season four times (when i watched episodes 1-4 of the first season).

Sketch comedy shows, um, TEND not to contain stand-up.

Sure, the same way that psychics "describe things accurately" — speak in vague enough platitudes that your audience is going to latch onto SOMETHING.

They'd save money on ADR.

And if you don't want to listen to Jesus, here's Brian Eno…

Murder trial defendant? It's the horse she was born to play!

Who?

You think you've got problems… try talking to people who are convinced someone else wrote Shakespeare. Sure, your Kennedy conspiracy guys are bad amateur historians, but at least they're not completely out of their depth about the basic facts of the 1960s.

I assume you mean among people who already (justifiably) hate Reagan?

Yeah… I don't know what influence the raw numbers have… my instinct would be that they'd give more weight to same day or live+7 (for example) than to those, but this could be wishful thinking. I mean, the underlying point is that both these shows re equally hopeless, and it's time for NBC to go with the…

The preliminary doesn't count — all it means is that a rough estimate was wrong.