Uygur the Horrible

I'll make this quick.

There's an old SCTV sketch that features Eugene Levy's dead-on impression of perenially irritating Today show movie critic Gene Shalit doing a commercial for Bayer aspirin. In the ad, "Shalit" shouts directly into the camera about how taking a couple of Bayer not only gets rid of the pain of a headache, it goes right to the source to eliminate what's causing the headache itself. Shalit then pops two aspirin and, as you might expect, suddenly vanishes in a puff of smoke.

I think of this sketch every time I make the mistake of watching Cenk Uygur on MSNBC.

While I may agree with Uygur on a few issues and I'm sure he's a decent enough guy, his on-air histrionics -- that bombastic delivery combined with his marble-mouthed inability to avoid violently abusing the English language -- turn my spine to glass and strip every nerve in my skull raw. I listen to him for a while and I honestly feel like I've had the shit kicked out of me in a prison yard somewhere. I get that Uygur is very proud of the fact that his Young Turks newscast is the most popular thing on YouTube that doesn't feature a small Asian girl covering Lady GaGa, but on a network like MSNBC his public access act looks positively ridiculous and amateurish. He kind of pompously says he wants Fox News to fear him -- or what, he'll meet O'Reilly in an alley behind a bar and roshambo him?

I don't need my left-leaning commentators to be overly cerebral dullards who function as human Ambien, but for God's sake leave the pummel-the-audience shtick to the dingbats on the right.

And if you can't do that, at least give me a couple of aspirin.