BULLSHIT!! KIDNAPPED!! JASON OF STAR COMMAND!! Herc's Season-Box DVD Vault!!

I am – Hercules!!

For a laugh-out-loud funny series, the mighty and mighty disarming “Bullshit!” has an awful lot on its mind. Far less partisan than Michael Moore’s work, it gleefully attacks thinking both liberal (recycling, reparations) and conservative (gay-bashing, organized religion) with equal aplomb. It’s won Writer Guild awards (Penn & Teller serve as two of its six writers as well as its hosts) and has been nominated for Emmys, and its second-season episode on recycling makes me nuts every time I think about it. One of the show’s virtues is its transparency. Notes Penn Jillette during the fourth-season episode “Reparations,” “Man, we are so glad we found John McWorter, an African-American, to make these points - because we’re just too fuckin’ white to say some of this stuff! We’re even too white to say ‘black’ comfortably.” To underscore Gillette’s discomfort, two scowling black men wearing postal uniforms and toting bags of hate-mail arrive on stage to stare at him. “So we’re saying ‘African-American’ no matter how many syllables it adds to the show!” The “Reparations” episode deals with the “black reparations movement” seeking recompense for slavery, as well as Indian casinos and Japanese-American internment camps. We also meet a strange black man, H.K. Edgerton, who looks like something out of a “Chappelle’s Show” sketch as he marches around downtown Asheville, N.C., in a rebel uniform ferrying a massive Confederate flag. Edgerton says he’s doing this to force the U.S. government into paying reparations to the South for warring with it 145 years ago - but we’re ultimately left with the impression Edgerton’s mostly just trying to meet girls. The “Prostitution” episode starts by telling us sex-for-hire is perfectly legal in many parts of the world, and until 1910 was legal also in most parts of the United States. A biblical scholar and theologian in a green pullover informs us the Christian church owned its own brothels and supported a legal system of prostitution until the Reformation of the 16th century. A visit to the not-seedy Wild Horse Resort & Spa outside Reno, Nev., demonstrates that legitimizing the trade almost certainly makes life a lot easier on everybody, especially the girls. Legalization dramatically reduces or eliminates violence, rape, exploitation, and even human rights violations. Disease too; monthly physicals at the ranch have never turned up a single case of HIV, at least according to the doc overseeing the check-ups. This episode is unusually fun for two reasons: a) loads of female nudity and b) Penn repeatedly making hilarious sport of the episode’s director. “The Boy Scouts” episode looks at how the organization – when it isn’t teaching knot-tying or tent-pitching – has been discriminating against atheists and homosexuals since the early 1980s, allegedly due to the latent influence of the Mormon church. When a producer posing as an preteen asks if his status as an atheist would prohibit him from joining the scouting ranks, a BSA rep wrote back with this:

“The Boy Scouts maintains that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God.”

Man! I, a former Scout myself, am now a substandard citizen because I harbor doubts about the existence of a supreme being? The rep couldn’t have written “God or gods” out of a little love for Titus Pullo or those stressed-out polytheists over on the Galactica?? It turns out the BSA’s new policies may be particularly unsavory because the organization has long been supported by taxpayer dollars. (Happily, we’re told the Girl Scouts eschew such discriminatory practices.) $22.49 gets you ten season-four half-hour chunks of “Bullshit,” which also tackle Ground Zero, the death penalty, cryptozoology, pet love, manners, numbers and abstinence. It is much recommended. Herc’s Popular Pricing Pantry