Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.
There are people who tell you to shut up because you're just a celebrity, but pundits, talking heads, they're every bit the celebrity and a lot of them aren't any more qualified than the average man on the street.
Some pundits have proposed that the aliens have come here to breed with us. Apparently, too much bike riding or something similar has rendered them incapable of reproducing within their own species. But do extraterrestrial infants toddle through your neighborhood?
Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.
Pundits talk about 'populist rage' as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class.
Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.
The perpetrators of the actual bad stuff that does real and lasting harm to people, like leakage of industrial chemicals into water systems, seem to get not so much as a second glance; the bloviation from media pundits and think tanks creates false problems that waste time and energy debunking.
I know the pundits and the news media have carried a lot of commentary about cameras in the courtroom, and there's a lot of controversy about it as a result of the Simpson case. But I have not had enough time to step back and enough time to evaluate that.
Americans have a lower opinion of Congress than they do of the NFL replacement refs, head lice, traffic jams, cockroaches and even the group to which yours truly belongs - Washington political pundits.
Government or politics in America today is big business. Everybody makes money involving themselves in one way or the other, whether it's pollsters, whether they are policy wonks, whether they are pundits, whether they are those who believe that they must call it as they see it and then to be fair about it.