Last night, when I came home from bowling, Bill-the-Honeybear was watching "Real Time with Bill Maher", which he enjoys watching. (I do, too, sometimes, depending on who the guests are.) I came in in time for the start of the "New Rules" segment. The first few were funny -- one was about the overacting of host chefs on the Food Channel, another about news photos of recently-deceased famous people lying in their coffins. But then he started talking about paranoid schizophrenia -- prefacing it with "I am not a doctor, but I am on television." And then proceeding to diagnose the President with paranoid schzophrenia, listing 'symptoms' and giving examples.

I am not a doctor, nor am I on television. But I'm smart enough to know that paranoid schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, one that is fairly difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to treat. And it is a disease that affects not only the sufferer but his or her entire family. There's not, to my knowledge, even a way to detect it early enough to prevent. But for the sake of a joke, Maher gets to play fast and loose with mental illness and its symptoms, from the relative safety of subscription cable.

Well, it's only a joke. Lighten up. Funny, but that defense didn't save Don Imus' ass -- or his job -- earlier this month. I guess we can add a new category to those groups about which it is still OK to make jokes: the mentally ill. (Fat's still there; gay is lingering, but on its way out; and I'm sure there are one or two more.)