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Yesterday, Comedy Central took out this ad in Variety to congratulate South Park on its Emmy nomination for their "Trapped in the Closet" episode, a good-natured, lightly self-satirizing attempt to chuckle at themselves for so readily allowing themselves to become Tom Cruise's bitch by yanking a repeat of that show because of its unflattering portrayal of the cherished corporate asset about to open a movie for parent company Viacom. But because of the copy's inclusion of the word "Jews," a term now copyrighted by Mel Gibson's Icon Productions, some people assumed the ad was some kind of reference to Gibson's recent war-mongering-Hebrews-related troubles. Today, a Comedy Central spokesperson assures the LAT that the ad is merely a quaintly retro dig at Cruise and riff on the time-honored "Jews run Hollywood" joke, not a perfectly timed assault on the currently rehabbing serial apologizer. We think the giant cartoon rendering of the Celebrity Centre should've been a pretty obvious tip-off as to the ad's target, but whatever. The publicists have spoken.

This, of course, means that the "full page Variety ad satirizing and/or expressing outrage at Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks" frontier is still wide open, and we look forward to seeing which brave soul spends some money (Ari Emanuel, we're looking at you) to be the first to splash the words "sugar tits" across the trade's blank canvas of protest.