Not really funny

I suppose that New Year's Eve, which in the US at least is associated with drinking to excess, is a good time to discuss this.

A couple of times in SL I've seen animations of intoxication. It makes me very uncomfortable, and very sad; I'd hoped that we as a culture had outgrown that.

Back in the Mesolithic Era when I was a child :), it was acceptable in popular culture to make fun of the intoxicated. Foster Brooks and Sheb Wooley's drunken alter ego Ben Colder both had that as their shtik.

(UPDATE: And who could forget Dean Martin? Well, actually, I could, because I did.)

It was even in cartoons! One WB cartoon I remember from my childhood featured a mouse trapped in a food processing plant. At one point, the mouse fell into a vat of "pickling solution" and emerged "pickled" (one of the endless euphemisms for drunkenness), staggering down a conveyor belt barely escaping fatal injury. It was supposed to be funny; I was in tears.

I don't think that one can build a career on such routines now. At least I hope not. (Actually, that wasn't the worst of it; remember Frank Fontaine's recurring character of "Crazy" Guggenheim on the Jackie Gleason Show? He added possible brain damage to the mix.)

I'm sorry if I'm Puritanical... but it's just inherently sad to me. (Yes, I have been intoxicated; it happened when I had dinner at a friend's house, and he served an appropriate sort of wine with each course. I became rather silly... but the next day I was embarrassed, and even more shocked at how I didn't realize at the time how I was slipping into that state and out of control. Never again.)