Pittsburgh Comics

Pittsburgh's finances may be a mess, but as our political leaders know well, its comic sensibility is increasingly highly refined. The laughter isn't limited to the political arena. Two titans of local sports talk radio, Mark Madden and Stan Savran, are apparently going at each others' reputations with rhetorical knuckles bared. Bob Smizik of the Post-Gazette's sports section writes about the dust-up in today's paper with an admirably straight face. You can almost hear Smizik and the rest of the P-G sports staff laughing in the background. The piece is written in a tone that's so straight that a reader or two might actually believe that Madden and Savran are serious, and that their argument is more than a comic diversion from anything that matters, even in the sports world. But they can't be serious. One sports radio guy calls another one a coward?! Their argument just doesn't pass the straight face test, and what they're arguing about can't possibly matter to anyone. Great joke all around, though, and nice work by Smizik and the P-G for bringing it to light.