Inside SINA, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals

This is easily the funniest and most inventive non-standup comedy LP I’ve ever heard. It’s a one-joke record, but what a joke and what a execution. It never gets old. The basic idea is that all animals ought to wear clothes, because “we’re all peeping toms of a sort” and no one should have to live with that sort of “temptation.” Not all animals, mind you, just “any dog, cat, horse, or cow that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches.”

This record takes you to a presentation by SINA, explaining their organization and asking you to join them in their crusade for decency, a word that gets used so much that it quickly loses all meaning. A farm by the New Jersey turnpike is declared a “moral disaster area” and Rain Jacopetti, poet laureate of SINA, treats us to her incredible ‘Ode to Decency.’ Dozens of jokes about admiring animal genitalia, bestiality, etc.

Although the hip San Francisco audience heard roaring at the deadpan delivery obviously gets the joke, it turns out that millions of Americans did not, and that the entire thing started five years earlier as an elaborate media prank by a dude named Alan Abel. To me this is comedy and protest at its best — a subversive & impassioned response to fundamentalists and moral police everywhere, cloaked in absurdity.