• Welcome back to CBS Radio, CEO Dan Mason. There are a couple of items in your inbox. Start with that Imus folder. [NYP]
  

There comes a point in every long-running, Peabody Award-winning series' lifespan when its creative team is faced with the artistic dilemma, "Well, we've already done the episode where Oprah's asshole and vagina find themselves in a doomed hostage situation. Where to go from there?" In South Park's case, it was to send a nuclear missile up Hillary Clinton's ladyflower, in a recent, 24-inspired episode entitled The Snuke. (Viacom's YouTube-scouring stormtroopers have already shot on sight anyone suspected to have posted clips, but here's a CNN report about it that, amazingly, never once utters the word "vagina.") A jubilant South Park staffer wrote to tell us about the exciting delivery that soon arrived at the production offices:

Our friends at Comedy Central left us a voicemail! Apparently the media bowling league competition has turned ugly. Actually we just have one friend at Comedy Central—this is [UPDATE: From a jerkface who has since apologized. Albeit at gunpoint.] Language NSFW. Unless you work at Viacom, we guess.

There's really no winning with Christian television-watchdog groups: Write a catchy country-western ditty in which a paranoid cowboy express his fear that Jesus is involved in a little homosexual voyeurism, wind up on the wrong end of an outraged press release; try to dramatize the Creator as a Being who engages in heterosexual relations, ditto. Multichannel News reports that the Parents Television Council is protesting the season finale of The Sarah Silverman Program, angry that the lack of a la carte cable channel choices makes it all too easy for impressionable children to stumble upon blasphemous programming concerning a Jewish comedienne's post-coital rejection of "the sex-obsessed Deity." (Deadpans a Comedy Central spokesman in response: "We've never been terribly popular with the Parents Television Council.") A clip of the offending material is above; after the jump, we pass along the PTC's painstaking, blow-by-blow inventory of each sacrilegious story beat:

• Comedy Central and TVLand head downtown to Hudson Street, although that may just be a plot by Viacom to make mass layoffs easier to handle. [NYP]
  

With most clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report deleted from Youtube, what's left? Viacom doesn't care, as they're already pre-selling the expanded capabilities of Comedycentral.com at the Media Summit conference. CC-hosted clips already have embed capabilities, allowing users to slap the clips on MySpace or blogs, Youtube-style. Of course, you don't get to pick what clips are available, nor can you avoid the occasional bumper ad. Expect to see more of those ads, in fact — otherwise, what's the advantage of spending money to host your own content?

We realize that it's customary to trumpet one's achievements by taking out full-page ads in Variety, but Comedy Central could be a little more careful about how it sucks up to the talent; while they're understandably proud about the early success of The Sarah Silverman Program, they shouldn't be so freely offering access to their proprietary methods to their rivals. Now that competing networks know the key ingredient in Silverman's secret chocolate sauce, soon everyone from Bravo to Lifetime will offer their own, inevitably inferior variations (FX will screw it up by attempting to explore how schizophrenia impacts a gruff proctologist's scat-obsession) on the formula, littering basic cable with shows in which female comics sing cute songs about blinding their mothers with various feces-encrusted implements.

Disney announces that it lay off 160 employees from their feature animation unit (Pixar workers are safe) in the next couple of weeks, generously offering newly superfluous employees an opportunity to spend much more time with their families during the holidays. [Variety]
Comedy Central orders six episodes of the Amp'd Mobile-originated animated comedy series Lil' Bush: Resident of the United States, a move that will surely send basic cable copycats scrambling to misguidedly snatch up the rights to whatever wallpapers and ringtones they find on their children's cellphones. [THR]
Foreign audiences once again prove they're not interested in seeing any film (not even the one with the rats going down the toilet!) but Casino Royale, which takes the international box office crown with $44.7 million, raising its worldwide total to $312.4 million. [Variety]
CBS extends David Letterman's contract through 2010, ensuring that Letterman will remain on the air longer than Jay Leno, who will be replaced on the The Tonight Show by Conan O'Brien in 2009 unless he discovers a way to quietly dispose of his youthful usurper. [THR/AP]
· Kevin Spacey finds a leading man for his MIT card-counting pet project 21, relative unknown Jim Sturgess. Spacey will produce, and may opt to play the lead's mentor himself. Please, no "Spacey mentors up-and-coming actor" jokes. You're far too classy for that. [Variety]

Dave Chappelle, America's most beloved no-show comedian, is set to once again thrill audiences with one of his trademark mysterious absences at the HBO-co-sponsored Comedy Festival this Thursday in Las Vegas:

· What happens when one of the producers of Drawn Together pounds some ipecac before being interviewed by Kennedy? Exactly what you'd expect: prodigious vomiting. Enjoy.
· We're willing to bet being instructed to write Roman Polanski into Rush Hour 3 doesn't even rate in the top ten most frustrating things that Brett Ratner has asked of screenwriter Jeff Nathanson during their collaborations.
· Someone at Mastro's seems to have near-perfect recall of what Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes recently ordered for dinner. Fascinating stuff, yet we find it odd the spy failed to mention the crucial detail that Holmes' ankle was shackled to a five-hundred-pound weight the entire meal.
· The real challenge for the product placement consultants wasn't getting their client's Treo phones a pivotal role in A Good Year, it was convincing Russell Crowe not to bludgeon a mouthy PA with it.
· Comedy Central's Insider blog has a timeline of how they broke the news that Rumsfeld was accepting an honorable shitcanning for last night's Republican bloodletting. All hail basic-cable-based citizen's media!

• A reader emails us that her friend who works at the Daily Show suggested sending us the sign above because it was just so funny. Wow, working at Comedy Central must be really depressing.
  

Finding himself with time on his hands post-CBS — despite that bitchin' new job at HDNet — Dan Rather will ... co-host? co-anchor? something ... with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert tonight on Comedy Central. The trio will analyze election results live starting at 11 p.m. ET, though unfortunately Rather says he will clamp down on his trademark insane folksy witticisms. We'll be heading out shortly to get our hands dirty with some participatory democracy here in New York, where we're already hearing rumbles of poll chaos around the city due to lost voter rolls and technical foul-ups. If you've run into inadvertent disenfranchisement today in NYC through agencies human or otherwise, let us know your tales of voter angst.

• Comedy Central rats out YouTube, clips pulled. [NYT]
  

Like so many struggling actresses seeking parts as "Big Breasted Girl in Elevator" in Adam Sandler comedies, it seems that Comedy Central has finally succumbed to David Spade's floppy-haired charms. They've signed up his Showbiz Show for a third go-around a full two months earlier than its second-season renewal, giving the comedian another 13 weeks to tie Hollywood to his bedpost and tickle it until it threatens to pee all over his silk, tiger-print sheets. A proud network programming executive sings Showbiz's praises on this special day:

It turns out the fishy-smelling-but-just-amusing- enough-to-post-as-fact news item circulating throughout the European press about a month ago, in which Trey Parker and Matt Stone claimed that Saddam Hussein was being tortured with forced viewings of his animated manifestation rolling around in bed with Satan, was, in a shocking twist that we could never have anticipated from a source as earnest and trustworthy as the two creators of South Park, just a joke:

Beating even the impressive headlines-to-episode turnaround times of Matt Stone and Trey Parker themselves, a Defamer reader drafted this cast photo of the inevitable South Park episode skewering Survivor: Cook Island and its almost-too-ridiculous -to-be-parodied race vs. race premise. We look forward to the requisite scene in which Cartman sensitively explains to Kyle why he can't play along at home, because "there's no bleeping Jew Tribe, Jew," though we can't help but feel this would have been the perfect opportunity for the recently departed Chef to preach in the final moments how it's time we all looked past something as surface as skin color, unless it's a shade of delicious mocha-chocolate covering the large expanse of a plus-plus-sized hooker's ass.

Sure, last night's Comedy Central roast of William Shatner was all about the Dick-licking. On the other end of the wholesomeness scale was proudly out Star Trek actor George Takei, having plenty of chuckles at Shatner's expense as well as his own. The camera went to him frequently, proving that the Comedy Central producers were just as fascinated as we were by Takei's joyous open-mouthed laugh-rictus. Above is a homage of Takei's best laughs, plus bonus man-smooch courtesy of roast comedian Jeff Ross.

If we were the more cynical sort, we might find ourselves wondering if a Comedy Central publicist locked Andy Dick in a janitorial closet with a handful of eightballs and a rolling yellow bucket filled with Grey Goose, refused to let him out until he'd consumed the entirety of his rampage cocktail, then whispered in his ear that the NY Post reporter wandering by just told her that she'd always dreamed of having the star of Less than Perfect give her a good, spontaneous fondling followed up by a solo watersports display. But as Occam's Celebrity Asshole Razor holds, the simplest explanation for a famous person's egregious public behavior is usually the best one, so Dick's biting and groping can probably be written off to the booze and drugs making him hungry and horny rather than ascribed to more complex PR machinations shaping his behavior.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Andy Dick gets wasted at a public event, runs his tongue along the faces of anyone wandering within licking range, then finds a play-by-play of his antics in Page Six soon after. The Sixies report on the C-list exhibitionist's latest Hollywood party performance art at Sunday night's Comedy Central roast of William Shatner:

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.