30 Rock gets it.

I don't usually watch sitcoms. Maybe one or two, like if an episode of "M*A*S*H" comes around, or a late-night "Honeymooners." But tonight I had the TV on while I was cooking dinner and allowed myself a glimpse at this week's "Comedy of the Awkward" (see my previous posts if you don't get what I mean).

Tonight on 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin went to a very small, blue collar, "middle-America" town, one that us "city slickers" might call "back woods" or even "redneck." He has been upset that Tina Fey has been seeking the next great, all-American comedy star in places like San Francisco and Toronto. He finds a ventriloquist and falls in love, thinking that people in these smaller, more rural areas are somehow better, kinder, nobler folks. Tina Fey, whatever her motivations, wants to prove him wrong. With but a few brief heckles, she brings out the worst, rudest, nastiest, most impolite, raunchy, and downright offensive comedy out of the ventriloquists, thus totally blowing Alec Baldwin's worldview out of the water. so much so, in fact, that he stomps on the dummy at breaks its head off.

The punch line , and I;'m not quite sure how it got there (I don;t have TiVo), came when the dummy said "All God's Children are terrible."

OK, that might not be completely true, there may actually be good people in the world, but just being in a small, rural community does not make you a more "good" person than living in a big, cosmopolitan city makes you a bad one. There is good and bad, smart and stupid, cruel and kind everywhere. Sometimes it's a different kind of cruel or kind, smart or stupid, but people are people, and they always will be.

And sometimes it can all be wrapped up in one person. I just chased down a purse snatcher and helped get the victim's purse back, but my choice led to the person I was with getting knocked to the ground and getting hurt. What does that say?