I saw it on its first airing!  My memories are very fond.  I would certainly have voted for it over any of the nominees above, mainly because I've seen none of them.

In Phil Berger's book The Last Laugh he relates that other standup comics would flock around whenever Winters got drunk (which was frequently), all of them carrying notebooks.  They would write down all the spontaneous lunacy that Winters would spout, knowing that he would never remember having said it, and then crib…

That's also possibly Rod Steiger's best role.  (Or maybe No Way to Treat a Lady.)

Well, some of the rhetoric certainly survives, yes, and you can still gain some political traction from accusations of "radicalism."  But the shadow power wielded by McCarthy himself dissolved, and the sort of overt persecutions the HUAC was then practicing dwindled out pretty rapidly.  Political rhetoric is one…

I think you're just being silly, and that's fine, but there are probably better things to do with your time.  Write that novel you always wanted to.

Gosh, you're right!  Context is just dumb!

Here's one: the court of cards in the book Alice in Wonderland.

Much like Brazil, in which the blinkered incompetence of the government proves as threatening as the vicious efficiency of Ingsoc in 1984.

We apologize for your loss.

In movies like this it's hard to know whether to blame the actors or the writing.  But the option certainly exists to blame both.

@avclub-cfe912f5cb3aa572bd1c9ae2a9b82207:disqus : Oh it unquestionably suffers.  It's one of those movies that just sort of sprays around its satire pell-mell and never quite gets to the bone.  It's just too rushed and cluttered.
But it does have some haunting moments— McDowell's fate is both over the top and poignant…

I love Lou Reed's Dylanesque recluse as well.  That's a fun movie.

I would argue that Britannia Hospital deserves a better rating.  It's nowhere near as good as If… or O Lucky Man! but it's fascinating nonetheless.  And Get Crazy! is at least fun.

I'm worried about the woman it mentions being groped by a Super Mario Brother.  Imagine the sound effect!

I've always gotten the sense that Britain considers the Blitz a pretty near miss— it seems like a huge part of pop culture, in comedy most definitely but also in general pop culture.  Kevin Brownlow's It Happened Here, all the Third Reich imagery in British pop/punk/new wave — half of Elvis Costello's 70s output was…

I'll never understand anti-abortion libertarians.  Hell, a true libertarian ought to believe you should be able to trade your child for land, let alone abort it.

The ironic part is that Mark was right, there was a better hand out there (the one that lost to Jez).  And it still didn't matter.

Of course the Pythons loved Hitler jokes ("I don't much like the sound of these here boncentration bamps!") and Spike Milligan titled his wartime memoir Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall.

Well, in a broad sense, yes, although in a broad sense the theme of "a young couple shattered and then comes back together" could apply to anything from The Philadelphia Story to Wild at Heart.  Clearly it's something open to a wide variety of treatments.

I think it's a bit of both.  The British do enjoy their Hitler— they even tried to make him into a sitcom.