1/18/03 - Stepup

The rending of garments and great weeping and gnashing of teeth is over although fallout may still rain upon the heads of the University of Virginia Pep Band.

The Pep Band's habit of participating in puerile pursuits of parody recently upset so many power brokers that the musicians have been sitting on the proverbial hot seat since the Continental Tire Bowl.

West Virginia University fans were shocked to be mocked in a half-time show as backwoods, hayseed sucking dolts with permanent port-a-johns in the backyard. UVa officials were appalled that the Pep Band would demonstrate on the 50-yard-line jokes they only tell in the executive wash suite.

Never mind that NBC made big bucks on a similar schtick with "The Beverly Hillbillies," we can't have students making a mockery of free speech by freely speaking. Why couldn't they just pick on Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein?

Mocking others

This wasn't the first time the Pep Band aped its hapless opponents into fits of apoplexy. They killed Elvis at the Sugar Bowl in the 1991 match against Tennessee. They've sent up just about every opponent imaginable as well as themselves, college party life, the UVa honor system and all things sacred.

The problem is that the Pep Band, which has been in existence since 1973, keeps forcing UVa administrators to write apologies that sound as if they are really sorry.

And so voices of reason clamor that the commonest of sense calls for nonproliferation of derisive commentary upon one's opponents, to which I add, don't worry. In due time it will all pass.

Average guys

As a white, middle-aged, middle-class mid-American from the upper Midwest, I believe time will relegate such Pep Band antics as making fun of opponents and student drug use (don't drop acid, take it pass/fail) to the proverbial dungheap of burlesque.

With the encroaching sense of sensibility in American culture, there soon will be no group or interest left to tease, taunt or deride except for white, middle-aged, middle-class men.

I'm not talking about crackers, biscuits, honkies or people with necks of color. We are talking about the average Caucasian male, a man every bit as funny as a colonoscopy.

If university administrators - a great majority of whom are themselves unfunny middle-age, middle class men - simply bide their time, the Pep Band will wilt for lack of material.

Imagine the difficulty facing a Pep Band scriptwriter trying to make gag lines out of light mayonnaise, gas grills, SUVs, bad golf clothes and worse scores, Monday night football, light beer and Led Zeppelin.

"Say, Buffy, how many white guys does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they just wait long enough and eventually their wives do it!"

Is that a great yuk or what?

You try it. Go ahead. Find a punchline, if you can, and send it to me. You'll see that one decade of trying to make white guy jokes and the next generation Pep Band will beg to sit in the stands and play stirring John Philip Sousa marches.

Heck, it may be the only way to avoid alumni requests for "Stairway to Heaven."

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