Taking a page straight out of a Seinfeld episode, Halle Berry offered a rather telling apology for a "Jewish slur" she said on the Tonight Show. They were doing one of those bits where they take pictures of her and use a computer to distort them, and when she came to one with a big nose she said "And this one is my Jewish cousin."

Yikes. 10 years ago we wouldn't have called that Jewish slur, we would have just called it a bad joke.

20 years ago, Don Rickles would have said the exact same thing and followed it up with "Just kidding, I love the Jews, my agent is Jewish" and he would have killed.

These days the audience is silent, the Tonight Show producers edit out the segment, and the star offers an apology the next day.

The funny thing about her apology, though, is that she claims she was simply repeating what had been said backstage by "the three Jewish girls that work for me." So Ms. Berry, in repeating the joke, forgot one of the cardinal rules of the ethnic joke – you can only tell jokes about the race/ethnicity/sexual orientation/religion that you personally belong to. Because if you're not, then you must have meant it in an offensive manner, you see. (Note sarcasm).

In other words, she could have told a black joke and the audience would have laughed. Or she could have had her people send out a press release stating that she's converting to Judaism. Both would have been ok.

Well, I hear that the writers do check out the blogs periodically. I have no idea if they read this one (wouldn't that be cool?), but you never know. There's the usual page and contact stuff up on NBC, but I highly doubt you'd ever get through to anybody on that.

I know that Rob Maschio, who plays The Todd, answers his email. You might want to send him some feedback at www.robertmaschio.com

how can we get in touch with the writers? I just want to say that it might be fun making the muscial episodes but I can tell you they are not very fun to watch!

WTF is wrong with cliches?
I thought it was a cool episode, but yeah, i did think it was lacking the connection with the last episode, but maybe they wanted the episode to be centered more around the person rather than her beliefs.. i dunno but i see what you mean