Cucumber Moon

Me and my prudish values* are disappointed in last night's How I Met Your Mother. To summarize, the show's in the middle of its fifth season, and the main plot point of last night's episode was that all the main characters are smokers and have been, unbeknownst to the audience, for the entire show. I didn't find episode was that funny, but I'm so sensitive to cigarettes that watching the episode made me a bit queasy, so I surfed the Interwebs to see what their zeitgeist reaction was.

I found things to be fairly mixed. Some people loved the episode, some don't disapprove of smoking but found it unfunny. (I assume the people without strong opinions didn't voice them.) Josh Lasser's article on Zap2It made the probably-observant point that the show perhaps had a tough time tonight with the non-smoking crowd. I don't think that non-smokers can ever really understand the insane lure of smoking." So maybe that's the reason for the split.

To get a better idea of the viewers, I also looked up U.S. cigarette smoking statistics, which informed me that about 20% (23.1% of men, 18.3% of women) of U.S. citizens smoke. If most of the people who don't smoke didn't find last night's episode funny, then, well, the episode was of poor taste. I do hope that smoking will return to the background as it did before, though. I've never associated with smokers, nor anyone who has begun smoking since I've known them, so from my probably-sheltered point of view, I've lost respect for the characters and the show. Actually, I just find the whole thing disgusting.

I suppose the person who wrote the episode was writing what they knew, but he ought to be aware of his audience. The first comment on the article above tells Josh Lasser: "please don't push your anti-smoking rhetoric onto people." (I thought it was nice that they said please.) I generally consider myself to be very open-minded on the scale of open-mindedness (or perhaps just extremely persuadable) but, thinking about it, I don't find anything wrong or persecuting about an 'anti-smoking rhetoric'. I mean, the boxes are required by law to say "Smoking Kills" on them, sometimes accompanied by pictures of various deformities. I can't think of anything more anti-smoking than that. Yeah, yeah, quitting is hard, but if you're going to smoke, you can be an adult and know the consequences of your actions. Like sounding like Harvey Fierstein. (And with that, I ostracize 20% of my readership.)

*Obviously not that prudish.