Cleaning Up Our Act

Anticipating more stringent guidelines on the internet, the Leftbanker staff, in an act of self-regulation, will be providing more family-oriented comedy. A perfunctory survey of the past few months will show that the quality of humor around here seems to have taken a turn for the worse. It seems you can’t read a single article here that isn’t some sort of instruction manual about how to apply a Dirty Sanchez or play a rusty trombone; or someone extolling the finer points of taking a dump, laying cable, or dropping the kids off at the pool; or an author penning a veritable treatise on getting your knob polished, or flogging the bishop; or a how-to guide for trimming the beard off the old goat. I don’t even know what the fuck that last one means but, knowing you people the way that I do, I’m pretty sure it is something completely filthy. I’m sorry to inform you that things are going to change.

Nothing in this essay is going to go anywhere near the human intestinal track. I plan on avoiding everything concerning the stomach, the large and small intestines, the rectum, and the anus. By this I mean the vitals themselves and all material found within aforementioned organs, whether its form is solid, liquid, or gas. This essay will certainly float above any attempt at humor which comes at the expense of the release of gaseous material from the human digestive system, whether it be as loud as a thunder clap, or of the silent variety that is usually quite a bit more offensive, olfactorily speaking—although I think that describing these hushed emissions as ‘lethal’ or ‘deadly’ is a bit hyperbolic, and in this era of heightened concern for terrorism there is no need to sow unwarranted panic.

The penis is another vein this essay will not mine, although if you look at the archives of this web site, that appendage seems to contain the mother lode of comedy. As they say on Oprah, I’m just not going to go there. Female genitalia—be they shaved, trimmed, manicured like something out of Edward Scissorhands, or as overgrown as a vacant lot—represent another forbidden fruit that I will not eat, metaphorically, figuratively, or stylistically speaking. Even if I were to eat this forbidden fruit, it would be the height of bad form to talk about it with my mouth full anyway. We aren’t savages here at the Leftbanker staff.

I am quite sure that this next item will make me very unpopular with the regular readership here, but in some ways I feel that the current supporters at Leftbanker are part of the problem, and not part of the solution in our battle to establish decency. I will quickly become the Osama bin Laden of contributors because I am refusing to discuss mammary glands, both surgically enhanced and as the lord meant them to be. I will not pander to the prurient and salacious interests of readers by making light of boobs as big as your head or those that are just perfect little handfuls. I haven’t checked it out for myself yet, but I have been told that there are other sites on the internet where you can look at somewhat suggestive pictures of women. Find another destination for your animalistic urges, readers; you will no longer find cheap gratification here.

We hope that you will enjoy the new family-friendly format here at Leftbanker. Go ahead, bring the kids along to read the new sanitized material. We can promise you that there won’t be a single mention of bodily injury, bodily functions, dead bodies, hot bodies, anything discharged—both painfully or otherwise—scabs, crabs, blow holes, a-holes, chancres, cankers, wankers, and spankers. Instead of making references to things more suited to men’s room graffiti, we will be shooting above the waist in our attempts at humor. We will avoid themes of scatology, sodomy*, and violence in favor of wholesome subjects like those addressed in the comic strip Family Circus or a rerun of Eight is Enough.

*Microsoft Word offers no synonyms for sodomy; if they did I was going to include them all in that sentence—just another example that humor cannot be fabricated by machines.