I Love Fred Armisen

Money Changes Everything

I don't know when it happened, but some time since the last Seinfeld show and now, Jerry Seinfeld became an asshole. My wife first pointed it out--his guest appearance on 30 Rock derived its humor from the fact that Jerry was so rich he could buy his own island. Then, his wife plagiarizes a cookbook, of all things, and Jerry makes the accuser look like a stalker on Letterman (it's on YouTube, and even Dave doesn't think it's funny). Behold, now, video proving what an arrogant jerk he is. (Oh, and another thing...he's not funny any more.)

Life is good

I often need to remind myself to count my blessings. This comic may help.
Click on the comic for a full-size, readable image.

The Onion

While I don't agree with the author's contention that mainstream newspapers should begin emulating The Onion, I do agree with his assessment of why we like it so much:

One reason The Onion isn’t taken more seriously is that it’s actually fun to read. In 1985 the cultural critic Neil Postman published the influential Amusing Ourselves to Death, which warned of the fate that would befall us if public discourse were allowed to become substantially more entertaining than, say, a Neil Postman book. Today newspapers are eager to entertain—in their Travel, Food, and Style sections, that is. But even as scope creep has made the average big-city tree killer less portable than a 10-year-old laptop, hard news invariably comes in a single flavor: Double Objectivity Sludge.

Too many high priests of journalism still see humor as the enemy of seriousness: If the news goes down too easily, it can’t be very good for you. But do The Onion and its more fact-based acolytes, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, monitor current events and the way the news media report on them any less rigorously than, say, the Columbia Journalism Review or USA Today?

During the last few years, multiple surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Annenberg Public Policy Center have found that viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are among America’s most informed citizens. Now, it may be that Jon Stewart isn’t making anyone smarter; perhaps America’s most informed citizens simply prefer comedy over the stentorian drivel the network anchormannequins dispense. But at the very least, such surveys suggest that news sharpened with satire doesn’t cause the intellectual coronaries Postman predicted. Instead, it seems to correlate with engagement.

Read the story here.

I Don't Get It

Breaking News!!!!

Oslo: A review of the ballots in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has shown that George W. Bush is the winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. James Baker III has been sent by the Bush Administration to coordinate efforts on the ground. The United States Supreme Court in a surprise vote of 5 to 4 have declared George W. Bush the winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Read the article here.

His Year of Flops

The Onion's A.V. Club (a non-satirical pop culture site annexed to the satirical pop culture site) has had a running feature this year called "My Year of Flops," in which a writer watches 104 movies (two a week, for the calendrically challenged) that were deemed flops on their releases, and he determines whether the movie was a failure, fiasco or secret success. I can't really tell the difference between failure and fiasco, but I know they're different from secret success.

Anyway, the series ran a good article recently about Albert Brooks' last film, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World." I love Albert Brooks, but the reviews were atrocious, so I avoided the film. However, since the writer of the series, Nathan Rabin, pronounced the movie a secret success, I'll have to put it on my queue.

This week's flop is "Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction." Of course Rabin considers this movie a failure, but the joy in reading the review is gems like this:

The naughtiness continues as [Sharon] Stone vamps her way through an interview with shrinkologist David Morrissey, a young man with Liam Neeson’s bulky frame and the charisma of beige wallpaper. Stone stalks around Morrissey’s office like a heavily Botoxed panther in the midst of a steep, permanent professional free fall. Morrissey diagnoses Stone as a thrill-seeker with a “risk addiction,” which sounds like the cheesy subtitle for a lame erotic thriller because, well, it is the subtitle for a lame erotic thriller.

Later, Rabin adds this on Morrisey's talent.

Now I don’t want to suggest that Morrissey is not a dynamic performer, but I suspect that the producers could have replaced him halfway through shooting with a handsome mahogany coat rack and nobody would be able to tell the difference.

Find the latest installment of "My Year of Flops" here.

Photo

This picture made me laugh like a seventh grader.

One of the Few Funny Forwarded Jokes I Have Ever Received

A guy goes to the supermarket and notices a beautiful blond woman wave at him and say hello. He's rather taken aback, because he can't place where he knows her from. So he says, "Do you know me?"

To which she replies, "I think you're the father of one of my kids."

Now his mind travels back to the only time he has ever been unfaithful to his wife and says, "My God, are you the stripper from my bachelor party that I made love to on the pool table with all my buddies watching, while your partner whipped my butt with wet celery???"

She looks into his eyes and calmly says, "No, I'm your son's math teacher."

Why not Spokane?

I have noticed that on MySpace/Facebook sites, people will list their hometown of Spokane as "Spovegas" or "Spokompton." While not denigrating the cleverness of such portmanteaus, I thought that maybe people could begin coming up with more clever names combining Spokane with other cites. To wit:

Spomaha

Sporange County

Sportland

Spokanogan

Sporofino

Sporlando

Spakron

Splos Angeles

Spritzville

Spenver

Spokansas City

And The Winner Of the Emmy For Greatest Actor Of All Time Is...

David Caruso

Rock

A while back, I was singing the AC/DC song "For Those About to Rock, We Salute You" to myself, when I realized what a weird idea for a song this is. Why are they about to rock? Why are they not in the process of rocking? Shouldn't he wait to salute them until after they are done? What if they are about to rock, but are prevented from rocking? Then you have saluted them for nothing.

This led to a stupid idea. I decided to create the following list.

Rejected preliminary titles for the AC/DC song "For Those About to Rock, We Salute You."

For Those Considering Rocking, We Salute You.

For Those On the Precipice of Rock, We Salute You.

For Those Who Have a Bullet in the Rock Chamber, We Salute You.

For Those With Rock On Their To-do Lists, We Salute You.

For Those About to Flip the Rock Switch (To "On"), We Salute You.

For Those Inadequately Prepared to Rock, We Salute You.

For Those On a Rock Sabbatical, We Salute You.

For Those Contractually Prohibited From Rocking, We Salute You.

For Those a Few Credits Shy of an Associates Degree in Rock, We Salute You.


For Those Whose Rock Plane is Taxiing, We Salute You.


I know there are more good ones out there. Post some in the comments section.

I Guess I'm Quirky

I used to think I didn't like "quirky" things. I thought I went for more substance. Used to, that is, until I read this article in The Atlantic Monthly. It says :

We’re drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today’s Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio’s This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs.

Ouch. I love This American Life, I love love Arrested Development, I love Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," I think Eggers is great, and I really liked July's movie "You, Me, and Everyone You Know." Thankfully for my ego, I read Burroughs' book "Running With Scissors" and I didn't really love it.

However, the damage is done. It doesn't feel very good to be put into a demographic category like that, to have someone say "Look, you fit neatly into this set of criteria." But I do fit. It appears that I'm a quirk lover, but I didn't think I was.

But what is "quirk"? According to the author of the article, Michael Hirschorn, it is:

an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions (on HBO’s recent indie-cred comedy Flight of the Conchords , the titular folk-rock duo have one fan), and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously. Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt.

He follows up this definition with two recent film examples of quirk: Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine. I liked Napoleon Dynamite and loved Little Miss Sunshine.

Oh no. I'm a quirkaholic.

As I said before, though, I didn't think I was. I hated the forced quirkiness of movies like Garden State and Waitress.

Ah, who am I kidding. If quirk is done reasonably well, I'm a total sucker. Micheal Hirschorn, you nailed me, and it doesn't feel good. As a final insult, here's a criticism of quirk that stings me.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It’s easy for David Cross’s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Read the entire article here.

More Humor From The New Yorker

This one is entitled "Four Short Crushes," by Paul Simms. Following is one of the four:

Well, well, well.

Just look at you, walking into this dreary bar and lighting the place up like the noonday sun at midnight, twirling a lock of your long auburn hair pensively as you search the room—for what?

For a soul mate, perhaps?

(I know, I know—I hate that phrase, too. Maybe that will end up being one of those things we both hate.) Maybe a few weeks from now, lying in your bed on a Sunday morning, I’ll ask you, “What’s your least favorite word or phrase?,” and you’ll say, “ ‘Soul mate,’ ” and I’ll laugh till you say, “What? Tell me!,” and I’ll tell you how I knew that from the moment I first laid eyes on you, and then we’ll have sex again.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You haven’t even noticed me yet. That’s O.K. I can wait.

Maybe when your gaze settles on me, and we lock eyes in that mutual Hitchcockian tunnel-vision effect where the camera is, like, pushing in at the same time it zooms out, or however they do that, you’ll come sit down next to me and we’ll—

Now you’ve spotted the friends you came to meet. They look like good friends.

Maybe they’ll be my friends, too.

Our friends.

Your eyes just came to life like emeralds lit by subterranean torches, and as you move across the room toward your friends you shriek at them, “What the fuck is up, yo?,” in a voice so piercing that the entire bar goes silent for a moment, and I have to check my glasses to make sure the lenses didn’t crack. You continue to bellow your every utterance (including the lines “Jägermeister is the bomb, dawg!” and “Just ’cause I’m a white girl don’t mean I don’t got some serious junk in the trunk!” and “Random! Random! Random!”), and the bartender leans in and whispers something to his bar back, and they look at you and laugh.

You must be a regular here.

(Duration of crush: seventeen seconds.)

Read the other three here.

Ruined

I wonder if this would happen to David Cross if he had a baby?

Click to hear a 30 second Onion "news" broadcast.

Simon Rich

Simon Rich is a very funny writer. I first heard of him after reading an article in The New Yorker in the "Shouts and Murmurs" section. Usually I don't find the section funny, but Rich's articles were clearly hilarious. They are made up of brief snippets like the one that follows: the premise is established in the title, then the piece briefly works through the premise.

Here is an excerpt from one of his pieces.

I. A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table

MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.

DAD: O.K.

GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.

DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.

UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.

DAD: We all are.

MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.

DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell.

MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.

FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!

DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.

MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!

DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!

MOM: Now everything is fine.

DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.

MOM: There was a big sex.

FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!

(Everybody laughs.)

MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!

GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?

ALL: Yes.

GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.

Read the rest of the article here.

Check out his book, "Ant Farm," here.

I totally want one of these

I'll put this right next to my yellow ribbon magnet.

James Brown after taking PCP, ecstasy and rat poison

Six Movie Formulas That Must Be Stopped

This is a great article, though I'm surprised the writers only came up with six.

The number one movie formula that must be stopped is absolutely spot on: "Put Robin Williams in a Comedy, Sit Back and Let Him Work His Magic"

I don't hate Robin Williams. I just don't think he is funny. My students are appalled when I tell them this. I watched ALL of the most recent "On Broadway" special on HBO, and I chuckled once. The following excerpt helps explain why I don't think Robin Williams is funny:

Why It Needs To Stop: We're at a total loss for the best Robin Williams comedy. Mrs. Doubtfire, maybe? He threw a piece of fruit at Pierce Brosnan. That's gotta stand for something, right? Aladdin gets points because we don't ever actually have to see Williams once, though the same five or six impressions he's been doing his entire career are everywhere. Without a standout winner, it is reasonable to conclude, then, that this formula has never once worked, which is astounding considering it's been used for close to thirty years and shows no signs of stopping.

(Sidenote: he was kind of funny in The Aristocrats. Speaking of The Aristocrats, who knew Bob Saget was so funny?)

Read the article here.

Do Not Adjust Your Bass