Fuddy Duddy Alert

This is a special holiday decoration set up by the owners of our neighborhood diner. Do you get it? The Santas are supposed to be drunk from drinking too much wine - because they are carefully arranged in haphazard positions on the wine rack -that's how you can tell.

I never find this kind of humor funny. Finding drunks funny goes back one generation to people around my parents' age. This generation found Dean Martin's drunken shenanigans on stage irresistible and the drunken humor of Foster Brooks hilarious. It's the same kind of humor that led to those WB cartoons where the comedic circumstance is derived from a drunk STORK dropping a baby off at the wrong house.

People getting so drunk that they are making huge judgment errors is not funny. Maybe it was a reflection of the seemingly repressed times (the 40's and 50's) that made people appreciate this just a little bit more than should have been acceptable. Cultural fictional time capsules in the form of advertising, television and radio would have you believe that the 50's were a time of staid responsibility and finely structured social confines. To see someone behaving in a way so against the norm was probably funny - perhaps even envied.

But it's not funny now that we know about addiction and the health risks of too much tippling in addition to the number of people killed each year by people whose driving ability has been impaired by too much imbibing.

I find this display offensive.