Lon Allan is right about the dangers of dirty comedy
Younger people who read Lon Allan’s column on Feb. 28 (“The best comedy is funny but not dirty”) might dismiss his negative views on obscenity-laced comedy and pervasive sex and violence on television as prudish and curmudgeonly. But these tendencies are not harmless — they represent a coarsening of our culture that desensitizes all of us to cruelty and abuse. More subtly, they undermine the attraction of our democratic society as a role model for other countries. The decline in standards of conduct and speech even poisons our political life, as we saw in November.
Jim Worthen, Pismo Beach
This story was originally published March 6, 2017 at 8:37 PM with the headline "Lon Allan is right about the dangers of dirty comedy."