LEE: The president now takes comedic license for the most serious shit imaginable. This attitude of "Hey, who gives a shit? We're going to say what we want but not be held accountable whatsoever because we're just using comedic license,” It’s kind of mind blowing that those tools were taken and now comics are left sitting there like with their dicks and their lady parts hanging out.

We're the ones that are supposed to have a who-gives-a-fuck attitude because what I say doesn't matter! And now the comics are like, "Well, Jesus, if they have no reverence whatsoever, to humanity or ethics or morals or decency or democracy, then yeah, then how interesting is irreverence? I feel like comedy is seems pretty impotent right now. At best it can describe the nightmare, but it certainly can’t influence it.

This article is seven years old, and Wonder Showzen is more than twenty years old. So reading this article helps me put our current times into a different perspective.

When George W. Bush was elected in his second term, I remember feeling a general sense of victory. That’s because my parents were both big Bush supporters, and the muted din of Fox News constantly reverberated through our house.

Now that I’m a little older, it’s useful to have a piece like this which paints that period in a much different hue.

And any excuse to rewatch Wonder Showzen is a good one for me.

But as far as the pull quote I used: I think this is one of the trickiest lines to walk in a democracy and in a society writ large.

We seem to really care about our sacred cows, but when you’re balancing the needs of billions of sacred cows, are any of them really sacred? How do you determine which sacred cows are worth holding onto?

How do you find that right balance which keeps our species moving forward together?

I remember first watching Wonder Showzen during a band trip to Ireland in 2005. I thought it was the weirdest and coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

This retrospective was really fun to read (if you were a fan like me), and it made me want to go back and watch the whole series.