Daring, Derivative

I thought at first, after reading your story about Tom Green, that it had to be a generational thing, that I was just too old to see the humor in his tricking his grandmother, on camera, into licking a vibrator (“MTV’s ‘Tom Green Show’ Finds Humor in Bizarre Confrontations,” by Sandy Masuo, Feb. 8).

But then I realized it was even more of a cultural-racial thing, that this was a white guy’s idea of fun. Because there isn’t any way in the world that a black or Latino man would ever do something like that to his grandmother--and live to tell about it, anyway.

TIM METCALFE

Los Angeles

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Green says he doesn’t mean “to discredit ‘Candid Camera’ ” as a source for his own pranks-with-passersby show. But Steve Allen was doing this stuff (better) in the ‘50s, and Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe’s man-on-the-street intercepts in the ‘60s far out-hipped Green’s.

There are, though, similarities between Green and “The Simpsons”: his self-consciously “weird” and “outrageously lurid” shtick is the kind of tedious “attitude” humor the series so deftly skewered in such characters as the rappin’-surfer dog Poochie and the Dennis Rodman-esque racehorse Furious D.

Yawn.

GENE SCULATTI

Los Angeles