So that was Christmas ...

Yes, the pond has seen "The Interview" ...

Please don't ask how, or especially why ...

Yes, it was a miserable Christmas, but the pond watched it to the bitter end.

Proof? Poor Digby ...

So this is where American cinema has landed. Poo and pee jokes, anal humour, buttholes, the butt of parody, homosexual fear, buddie land against the world ... and as funny as a fart wafting in the breeze ...

As comedians, Seth Rogen and James Franco are as subtle as an elephant squatting on a pit ...

But everyone knew that already.

Now the real questions have to be asked.

Up until the viewing, the pond was inclined to blame the dastardly North Koreans.

And it's true that the sheltered Northerners might be too dumb and insular to see what a devastating blow against American culture The Interview represents ...

They might think the feeble thrusts and barbs in the film might carry some weight, of the kind Charles Chaplin managed when he provoked Hitler with The Great Dictator ...

But hey, reality check.

The only way Sony was going to get attention paid to this scatological, humorless film - oh, how the pond yearned for a dose of Rabelais - was to make it a scandal du jour about freedom ...

So in the end, it's the fault of whoever greenlit the show in Sony. And while we're at it, Sony, which has been relentlessly stupid when it comes to intellectual property rights, thanks to its relentlessly stupid lawyers, achieved another relentlessly stupid summit yesterday, as noted in The Verge here.

Meanwhile, everyone who had a miserable Christmas has felt the need to share the news with everyone else.

Cue the pond. You can take the person away from the Catholic guilt, but you can't take the Catholic guilt out of the person.

Amongst the many wags and pundits who took a view, this one struck a note with the pond:

When the sage said it’s not the high ground democracy needs to protect, it’s the low-hanging fruit, The Interview is what he had in mind. (and the rest here).

Provided you construe low-hanging fruit as the corpse of American cinema comedy, and every great American cinema comedian, from the days of Keaton and Chaplin on ...

So that was an American Christmas ...

Well now it's back to silence. The holiday season can only get better ...