So, at the just wrapped Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, TBS president Steve Koonin declared in his July 17 keynote address that TBS was the number one comedy network on cable TV, so says Variety. Bragging about a 75 percent increase in primetime ratings numbers in a Powerpoint presentation in his keynote, Koonin noted the advantage over what he called the runner-up, Comedy Central.

Uh-oh! I should also mention that Comedy Central was co-sponsoring the event, and were in the room when Koonin dropped this bomb. Protests from the Comedy Central partisans were abound!

And sure, Koonin and a spokesperson did downplay any sort of rivalry and denied a “comedy war” between the two networks, with Koonin noting that each network’s business model was as different as “apples and kumquats” and the Comedy Central call-out was used to provide “context” to the ratings boost.

I don’t know though. There’s a part of me though that feels like this TBS/Comedy Central drama would be like when mom and dad would fight, you would ask them outright if they were fighting, and they would deny it and just say that they were having a spirited discussion. Then later that night you would hear their spirited discussion through the walls in your house, each syllable exploding louder than bombs in your psyche, and you would then proceed to bury yourself in your blankets, hoping to drown into the covers as searing tears would stream down myyour face into a Rorschach inkblot, indicative of the future therapy you would need, as your last vestiges of childhood went out with a whimper. In the dark. Alone.

It’s kind of like that. I personally thought TBS was really the station where Office reruns lived, and they give Tyler Perry a paycheck every so often.

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