Comments on: At The Risk of Sounding Stupid…

By: Christian

Christian — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:10:10 +0000

This is a much better joke along those lines:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/comics/king.html?name=Bizarro&date=20070628

By: tee_eff_em

tee_eff_em — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:57:57 +0000

I turned the brightness control on my teevee all the way up, but the shows didn’t get any smarter.

(apologies to whichever stand-up I stole that from)

By: Keera

Keera — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:25:52 +0000

Or: Many TVs work in such a way that if you set them in stand-by with the remote, you need the remote to get them out of stand-by. Mine’s that way. Turning the power off and on has no effect on the stand-by mode.

By: Marshal

Marshal — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:36:23 +0000

Daniel J. Drazen,
The lack of a lie detector chip in TVs is why most politicians can
stay in office.

By: hm

hm — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:21:42 +0000

There is still a “V-chip”, a little more refined now. It uses those show ratings to control what shows you can see. If you try to watch something that violates the settings you have to enter the parent password. Otherwise it just shows a black screen and a message saying that the show is blocked.

I think you can set it not just by the rating (TV-14 for example) but also by what the rating is based on (violence, nudity, adult situations etc). You can also block complete channels…at least that’s how mine works.

I like the idea of the stupidity controls, although sometimes the stupid stuff is the most fun.

By: Lihtox

Lihtox — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:17:25 +0000

It could be the other way around: perhaps all TVs come with a filter which *only* allows stupid shows in, and the filter is turned on by default. Turn the filter off, as Arlo does, and wow, look at all these great shows! It’s a nice fantasy, anyway.

By: Daniel J. Drazen

Daniel J. Drazen — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:47:15 +0000

The lack of “stupidity control” in real life is the only thing keeping C-SPAN on the air.

By: Marshal

Marshal — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:19:11 +0000

Was Gene ever shown to be a big TV watcher like some of the
other comic kids. Although I’ve read this comic for many years
Gene was getting close to going to college and pretty much
vanishing from the comic except for the occasional story arc.
I started reading when Jimmy Johnson did the story arc about
the fisherman and the mermaid… I like that, sometimes wish he
would do more.

Frosted Donut,
I could be mistaken but I think modern TVs still have the V-chip.
I’m sure some parents use the capability. I’m also sure that even more
parents don’t. Oh, and the fact that the manual tells how to reset
the v-chip to 0000 is not a good reason not to use it. Since the child
would need to know the original password in order for the parent
not to find out they were watching forbidden channels.

By: George P

George P — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:44:32 +0000

I think “somebody turned on the stupidity filter” would have been clearer.

By: Frosted Donut

Frosted Donut — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:23:57 +0000

Remember the “V” chip? That was a chip built into every TV set that was going to let us set a level of carnage and mayhem we (or our sensitive family) could tolerate. Then whenever a TV show came on that exceeded our V-level, the TV would show us pictures of rainbows and kittens. (Okay, I made up the part about the rainbows and kittens.) It turned out that nobody ever really set a violence level, because it was too hard to figure out how to do it. Plus, you’d get really tired of watching “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” all the time.

Arlo has got an S-chip in his TV set. Whenever TV exceeds a certain level of stupidity, it shows him articles from “The New Yorker.” Unfortunately, any setting of the S-chip cuts off pretty much all TV.

It’s a reasonably clever way of saying “everything on TV is stupid.” Is everything on TV stupid? Discuss.