Are You Smoking Yet?

Some loser crybaby in Britain complained about cigarettes in episodes of "Tom & Jerry", so now Turner Broadcasting is going through all those cartoons to cut out any glamorized images of smoking. Which is all of them. Just watch your now-uncool baby try to fly from the top of the bookshelf or hit his sister in the head with a frying pan. Violence is not cool. Smoking is.

What offended the lady, specifically?

In the first, “Texas Tom”, the hapless cat Tom tries to impress a feline female by rolling a cigarette, lighting it and smoking it with one hand.

Guess what? That's all kinds of cool. It would impress the fuck out of me, doing all that with one hand. It's like, "Hm, what else is that dexterity good for?" In America, I've only ever met one person who rolls their own cigarettes, and guess what? He's the really good-looking singer of a really good band. I say smoke away, Tom.

In the second, “Tennis Chumps”, Tom’s opponent in a match smokes a large cigar.

Bad guys smoke cigars. It's common knowledge. The only non-bad guy I've ever seen on television smoke a cigar is Elaine on that one episode of "Seinfeld" where she's the boss of J. Peterman, and she was only smoking it get into the character of a ruthless executive. You don't even inhale cigar smoke, so it's like, almost healthier!

They've been censoring cartoons for years now, from cutting naughty images early to just not airing some entirely. Most of the censored cartoons aren't that way because they're super-cool, or ultra-violent, it's because they're fucking racist. I can specifically remember watching "Tom & Jerry" cartoons in my youth, and Tom was owned by a fat, black, faceless Mammy character - and this was in the mid-to-late-'80s.

That's not cool.