Postal Protest Over Comedy Sketch
The Postal Service is going ballistic over a Fox television comedy sketch about mail employees going postal.
The Postal Service said Wednesday it is calling on its 750,000 employees to contact Sandy Grushow, chairman of Fox Entertainment Group to protest the sketch on Saturday's episode of "Mad TV." It is asking millions more employees of its private-sector partners to protest, too.
The skit features "disgruntled postal workers at odds with one another over who has the right to go on a shooting spree first," according to the program's Web site.
In a statement, Azeezaly S. Jaffer, the Postal Service's vice president of public affairs, described the sketch as "unfair."
"It's ugly. It's untrue. It's an insult to every man and woman in the Postal Service," he said.
Fox spokesman Joe Earley said he hadn't seen the Postal Service response, but called Mad TV "a satire and an equal opportunity offender having taken on many movies, television shows, personalities and institutions, including Fox broadcasting and other divisions of News Corp."
News Corp. owns Fox.
The Postal Service noted that an August 2000 study found its workers are not more violent than other workers and that "going postal is a myth, a bad rap."
"It's my guess that they didn't even read it and they probably just gave it a few seconds on their news show," Jaffer said.
In the past, the Postal Service has also protested violent videogames called "Postal" and "Postal 2." It lost its lawsuit, however, earlier this year.
He called on employees "to turn the volume up so high that senior executives at Fox hear us loud and clear — and pull this insulting piece. Funny's funny. And this skit isn't."
In the "Mad-TV" sketch, while customers lay on the floor, "there is much heated debate and gratuitous gunplay" between the two postal workers, the Web site says. Then "a non-postal gunman enters and adds to the confusion and gun-toting goofiness."
The sketch features guest star John C. McGinley of the NBC comedy "Scrubs."