DanMargarita.com

It seemed to me that a good portion of the commercials involved jokes that emanated from below the waist. There was a Scotsman standing over a grate to get a cool breeze up his kilt, Cedric the Entertainer inadvertently getting a bikini wax, a candle-holding woman being singed by a flatulent horse, a quarterback fondling the toilet paper protruding from his centers behind, and a man being bitten in the groin by a pooch. OK, I admit that I laughed at that one, but that was before it seemed to become a pattern.

It's not that I'm a prude. A certain amount of blue humor in the right circumstance can be funny, but the reliance on it by advertisers seemed unnecessary. Charlie Chaplin, perhaps the greatest physical comedian of all time, could be risque but didn't take a knee to the groin to my recollection.

The Three Stooges, the best known of all the slapstick comics would've had a field day with today's standards. Moe was known to get his rear end set on fire, but not once did he ever break wind (on camera).

Perhaps the crotch humor wasn't out of line considering the amount of commercials dedicated to drugs designed to treat men suffering from erectile dysfunction. One for Levitra features a man throwing a football through a tire---football's answer to a train going through a tunnel. Another ad for a rival product, Cialis, which I admit I didn't see, purportedly announces "If you have an erection that lasts more than four hours, seek medical attention." That's a form I don't want to fill out in the hospital admitting area.

Of course the big news is what happened above the belt. More specifically, Janet Jackson's belt during her performance on the MTV produced halftime show. Wouldn't you know? I'd changed the channel. At the end of Ms. Jackson's lip-sync with Justin Timberlake to a song, the former 'N Sync heartthrob reached over and grabbed the patch of cloth covering her right breast. As is wont to happen when unclothing a breast, it fell out and into full public view. Jackson, Timberlake, CBS, MTV, the NFL and possibly even Walter Cronkite apologized for the incident.

Jackson and Timberlake claimed that it was an accident, although the fact that she had a medallion on her breast made that sound implausible.

The controversy seems to have taken on a life of its own. Members of Congress have called for a federal investigation. Considering all the arm-twisting it took to get the Bush Administration to agree to an investigation into the decision to go to war with Iraq, the willingness to investigate the incident makes you think Janet Jackson was hiding Weapons of Mass Destruction under her shirt.

So, in the next few months if you turn on C-Span you might see a bunch of old men running a video of Jackson's breast...over and over an over, like the Zapruder film.

"Now, you can see here in frame 42 Justin Timberlake's hand reaches for the breast. By frame 45 the cloth is off and we see the breast. There's been speculation that there was a second breast, or as it's becoming known "The second breast theory.'"

It was in poor taste, was the wrong venue and was unnecessary but a congressional investigation seems a little over the top.

However, if they can't find WMD's in Iraq, maybe they can tell us how that streaker got on the field at halftime.