There's a big difference between maintaining an awareness of your surroundings & the influences that impact your life, and hypersensitivity. I always try to find humor in that which was intended as witty, creative, funny or glib - even if it's delivered in so artless a way by writers or performers so inept that it could potentially be judged offensive or hateful.

Finding the Snickers commercial to be homophobic goes way high on the "hypersensitivity" meter. Comedy is, at its heart, a mini-spotlight aimed at some slightly different - and potentially uncomfortable - trait or characteristic, and then rubbing a small, carefully measured and timed grain of salt in the wound.

"I've got a cousin who...," "my mother is so...," "what's the Jersey Turnpike got in common with...?" "there was a young lady from China..."

All those take a visible, obvious characteristic and expand and exaggerate it and the audience finds it funny PARTLY because they're glad it's not referring to THEM.

However, the most recent Three Stooges of Stupidity, Hardaway, Washington and Coulter, immediately peg the meter over to Hate Speech - and then want to claim the sanctuary of intended-comedy.

No way, Jose. You stepped in it, now you have to live with the smell. And you're longer welcome to walk up my driveway, much less leave your shoes under my bed!

So don't guard your laughter and sense of humor so jealously that you see Jerry Falwell behind every (dare I say it?) bush. If you can't laugh at the presentation, laugh at the attempt.

Reserve your righteous rage and ire for the Two Snickers and the Marshmallow.

(That was an "attempt." Did it work?)