Joshua Muravchik writes for Commentary magazine:
A minute later the door opened and a strange character appeared, his tall frame draped in some kind of yellow garment that looked like a slicker, a tight cap pulled down on his skull above a pair of reddish wrap-around sunglasses. He sported a thin Van Dyke beard and a thick chain of jewelry around his neck. Raising a fist adorned with rings on every finger, and evidently waiting for me to do likewise, he uttered something that sounded like “Respect.” I offered my hand.
At once he let loose a stream of words in an odd patois of British street slang and mangled grammar in which personal pronouns were always used in the wrong case and verb forms never matched their predicates, the whole delivered in a Jamaican-tinged accent. I could make out most of the words individually, but the phrases into which they were strung seemed impenetrable. Then he vanished.
Dumbfounded, I struggled to make sense of the scene. On American radio, the shock jock Howard Stern has a few regulars on his program who are or who are meant to be amusingly defective. Could British TV have gone a step farther, inventing a form of sick comedy with an impaired host? I tracked down the producer and put to him my question about the tall man in the slicker. “Is he retarded?” The producer pondered, then replied: “He’s not the sharpest pencil in the box. But retarded—no.”
Having chewed on this for a few minutes, I decided that I wanted out.
