A priest, a rabbi and a duck walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "What is this? A joke?"

Ba dum ching.

Unfortunately, the folks at Comedy Central don't seem to know the difference between good-natured humor and vile insulting content that deliberately offends a huge segment of the population.

Last month, the network announced it is developing a new animated show titled "JC," featuring a hapless Jesus Christ living on his own in New York City.

The synopsis at Comedy Central's "Insider" website says, "A half-hour animated show about JC (Jesus Christ) wanting to escape his father's enormous shadow and to live life in NYC as a regular guy. A lot has changed in 2000 years and he is the ultimate fish out of water. Meanwhile his all-powerful yet apathetic father would rather be playing video games than listening to JC recount his life in the city. JC is a playful take on religion and society with a sprinkle of dumb."

Actually, based on previous depictions of Jesus on Comedy Central shows such as South Park, as well as the treatment of Christians and Christianity on shows across this network, the funniest part of that synopsis is the use of the word "playful."

Perhaps most curious of all the results of the recently released Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) study "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds" are the headlines it has generated.

"Researchers shocked at kids' online time," says one. "U.S. kids using media almost 8 hours a day," another screams. "New media use by children up by hours per week," another story warns.

Essentially, the news coverage since last week's unveiling of the updated research on children, teens and the media has focused on the sheer quantity of media consumed by America's youths, and this is newsworthy, to be sure.

The very idea that children and teens are physically able to absorb more than 53 hours per week of media content — or seven hours and 38 minutes per day — astonished even the researchers, who had thought the previous average of six hours and 21 minutes per day calculated in 2004 represented the maximum amount of time that could be spent.

Even more mind-boggling, thanks to multitasking (using more than one kind of media at a time) children and teens "actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes … worth of media content into those 7½ hours," the KFF study says. A note to the already astonished: The study didn't include the time youngsters spend texting via cell phones. Add another 1½ hours per day.

As the mother of four, I wonder if the folks who are surprised by this research have children. It strikes me that only the childless would be shocked by the results. The rest of us spend much of our time saying things like, "Turn off the computer and go to bed."

Left: The cast of MTV's "Jersey Shore." Snooki is the girl in black.

A message for Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi: I am not a hater.

I can see why you'd come to that conclusion after last week, when my comments about you and the show on which you appear, MTV's "Jersey Shore," made their way from Us Weekly online to countless entertainment Web sites, including the infamous PerezHilton.com.

But honestly, it's not personal, Snooki; it's strictly business.

They don't call it a "news cycle" for nothing. As surely as the minute hand winds down the waning moments of 2009, headlines bombard us with a now familiar theme for every New Year's week: The Recap. This time, we're reviewing not only the year that ends at midnight Friday, but the decade as well -- a period one of the newsmagazines is calling the "Worst Decade Ever."

Ouch.

Decade-in-review stories interest me because I'm afflicted with a memory like Swiss cheese. Pointing and clicking my way through the headlines, I'm saying, "I remember Kelly Clarkson," and "Oh yeah ... Halle Berry's Oscar" and "Has it been that long since the wardrobe malfunction?" Time flies like a bustier at a Super Bowl, doesn't it?

Of course, there were seminal occurrences during the past 10 years that have redefined our country and our culture, and those remain with us as current events. Richard Hatch's victory on the first season of "Survivor" gave us "The Bachelor" and "Jon and Kate" and the recent ill-fated "balloon boy" attempt at celebrity.

The Facebook guys gave us "friend" as a verb and teenagers with bad grades.

Those hanging chads of 2000 gave us a generation of Bush-haters and a lucrative career for Al Gore in climate change.

The inconceivable and surreal tragedy of 9/11 gave us the war on terror, now being fought by 18-year-old men and women who were still wide-eyed children on the day it began.

Sneakers? Check. Morning TV show to pass 40 minutes on an elliptical machine? Check. Soft-core porn advertising for the commercial break? Check.

Who knew you could burn so many extra calories at the local gym just being humiliated by the content of an ad for designer watches? Thanks to Italian fashion icons Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, we can all cringe with embarrassment while three anorexic-looking twentysomethings engage in the latest TV and advertising fad: Sexual threesomes.

You are probably wondering how sexual perversion and timepieces go together in a television commercial. Me, too.

Apparently the target audience for the brand D&G Time includes promiscuous young adults with upward of $650 to spend on a simple wristwatch. I guess when the watch is all you plan to have on at the end of the day, it had better be special.
 

Thanks to Oprah Winfrey's interview of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, I'm heading out to buy her book, "Going Rogue: An American Life."

Like millions of Americans, Mrs. Palin intrigues me, not because I'm a huge fan or a huge skeptic, but because despite mountains of media content produced about her, she remains a mystery.

Those who want the stereotyped, "Saturday Night Live" image of Mrs. Palin to hold up as fact argue that the mainstream media has offered an accurate picture of the woman and that picture is "I can see Russia from my house."

It has a long way to go to make its organization's name a reality, but the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood claimed an important recent victory.

CCFC has for years sought to reveal the truth about so-called educational videos designed ostensibly to increase the brainpower of growing babies. Studies show no measurable gains in intelligence or verbal skills associated with baby videos. In fact, researchers at the University of Washington found that for every hour per day of screen viewing by infants aged 8 to 16 months, a measurable decrease occurs in communicative development.

In 2006, CCFC filed a Federal Trade Commission complaint against Baby Einstein and brand owner Disney, charging that the company's marketing misled parents into thinking the videos could positively impact development and learning.

Back in 2005, I was asked to consider auditioning for the reality show “Wife Swap,” the premise being that I would visit the home of an uber-cool family that was unaccustomed to my authoritative parenting style, and a permissive and culturally savvy mom would stay in my home with my husband and our four children (presumably to be appalled by the sight of children who read newspapers).

The honorarium for this appearance was to be $20,000. My children thought this was a big pile of money, but that’s before any of them enrolled in college. They know better now.

Through emotional outbursts in virtually every corner of our culture, from the halls of government to popular music to professional sports, famous folks recently have offered up a veritable smorgasbord of bad taste on which to comment.

Summing up: People are rude.

The flurry of incivility that lately has found its way to Youtube's "most viewed" list ought to make us worry about the messages our children are getting, given that Youtube is the most popular Web site for children 8 to 18. It's time to turn our kitchen tables into learning labs and take advantage of this week's teachable moments.

To review:

I finally had to sit down with my 11-year-old daughter for "the talk." Despite my best efforts to preserve her innocence and protect her from growing up too quickly, I simply had to tell her some important facts of life.

No, we didn't have a talk about how babies are born. This talk was about America's assault on girlhood. The time finally came for me to explain to my daughter the relationship between media and marketing and money, and why some people think nothing of exploiting girls if it increases their ratings, sells advertising and beefs up the bottom line.