This is someone I linked to in the post about different kinds of comics. Tommy Tiernan, and Irish comedian who tells stories and is is excellent. This special, “Something Mental,” was on Comedy Central one weekday afternoon I think and I caught most of it, including this long bit about funerals.
Comedy for this raining, draining day in Brooklyn.
“How to Make a Delicious Chocolate Milkshake”
That’s just fine, I’ll watch this person’s YouTube channel the rest of the day.
There are over 100 of these and holy shit they are funny. And just like everyone at Reddit, I haven’t a clue why I think that.
Comedy You Can Sell!
This article from the NYTimes is about the ongoing stand-up comedy boom, written by a guy named Andrew Clark. Andrew takes a short amount of time to plug his comedy club, his book, and his stand-up comedy-college program and then goes on to make up some bullshit about some faction war between “alternative” comedy and club comedy today.
There very well may be this kind of dichotomy in stand-up as understood by comics. If there is, I couldn’t give a shit because I like things that are funny. If a comic likes to mumble jokes or do a kind of lip-bite nail-chew motion the entire time or tell stories with jokes in them or is a sexy gross-out comic or lays jokes out like Henny Youngman, I love hearing it because all of these people are funny. I’ve got my own sense of humor and I don’t care if the guy is a multi-month tour-bus dude or on his way up, it’s funny either way so I’m fan.
Clark says alt-comedy is “safe” because people in small venues don’t heckle (which is wrong), and how “real” comics can handle the brutal aggressiveness of crowds that…like them? I couldn’t figure it out. Hecklers are assholes. Some comics (like Burr) like it and say it makes them stronger, but hecklers are still assholes. Clark seems to imply that audiences at alt-shows are also bad audiences because they don’t subject comics to the mad rage of a Memorial Day Red Sox loss. Shows in coffeehouses are probably quieter and less heckle-y because they’re in a goddamned coffeehouse. Can you imagine heckling at a Starbucks? Man, talk about a rip-roaring evening of real comedy! Clark doesn’t consider the idea that silence can be as aggressive as drunk yelling.
He takes a brief time to talk about comedy podcasts, which he says have shown us that comedians can be “interesting, even deep, thinkers”, hastening to add that everyone already knew that. Also, is that all? What about podcasts showing us comics can be hysterical emotional people? What about variety-style, bit-driven* podcasts that aren’t meant to function as serious interviews? These have changed stand-up comedy too.
Bill Burr’s podcast (which Clark touts heavily) contains the same emotional, autobiographical material that Clark says is alt-comedy’s marginally successful M.O. He drives home the division of the “amateur class” vs. “professional class” of comedians, while at the same time bemoaning the as-late emergence of the hobbyist comic (see: aforementioned stand-up college program, which costs over $10k. Scrap some dough together and go to school in Canada for that hobby, bucko!).
Frankly, for all he’s doing just writing about stand-up in the NYTimes at least, he’s blowing sick all over it by being such a horse’s ass of a shill for his shit overall. Or maybe I listen to too much Eddie Pepitone.
* I use “driven” loosely for this particular podcast
Donald Duck PSA about Income Tax, 1943. Donald is told (by his radio) taxes are a wonderful thing. It helps our country make “guns, guns, all kinds of guns!” That’s a direct quote.
One Two Three
1) Gay Superbowl 2 minute recap
There’s a whole lot of variations on the “Shit Girls Say” video. This is one of three in a series (#3 is bloopers!). They’re really fucking funny.
All the “Shit” videos appear to be made independently. There’s not even a set group making many of them. Some are great quality and some are not, but almost all of them are fun to watch. Like Shit Asian Dads Say. There’s also “Shit [someone] says to [someone]” versions (white girls to black girls; people to Native Americans). Almost all of these are performed by the person to whom the shit is being said. For my money, some of the best involve men in drag (Fat Girls, Single Girls).
Funnier still, the best way to take your pick of a big list of them is to YouTube search, simply, “Shit”, for hopefully the first time in your life.
3) And finally: Welcome… to Jurassic Park
true (UPDATE)
SAD COMEDY:
-Maria Bamford (on Conan) said Paul Deen’s recipes sound like suicide notes.
(UPDATE) SADDER STILL: Paula Deen’s contribution to Oprah’s magazine’s 6-word memoir series. The current issue.
HAPPY COMEDY:
Todd Glass is really happy. I mean gay. I mean BOTH!
that reminds me
(This post is parenthetical)
I e-mailed a list in haste the other day, during a discussion that began with Louie S1:E1 and ended with me busting out this list.
Louie
Arrested Development
MST3K
The State
Strangers With Candy
Larry Sanders Show
Ren & Stimpy
Mr. Show
Seinfeld
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
Ostensibly this is my “Top 10 comedies on TV ever” list, but much like anyone’s “ever” lists, it’s solid as mud.
Kids in the Hall isn’t on there, and it should be. Formative to my own sense of humor in a huge way. I excluded Portlandia for an arbitrary reason of age, though it’s not much younger than Louie so that’s not fair. I don’t want to bump any off to hold rigid to 10, since that makes no sense, so I’ll just saw those 12.
Kids in the Hall - Folk Music
“So I just want you to sit back, and relax. Cuz the acoustic guitar never did anybody no harm, no how”
One of the Kids’ finest. And now I can watch them whenever I want.
New Year
New Design (who cares)
Old ambitions:
More open mics, more posting. I just left TV-cabled life and now have more access to comedy than ever before. Spent the morning of Saturday the 31st like so many Saturday mornings past, watching Kids in the Hall and Mystery Science Theater 3000. What a happy boy am I. It’s already the 2nd and I’m now discovering Hulu carries 100 CCP episodes. Tonight’s was Ted Alexandro, who I’ll talk more about when it’s not so late. Gotta string out these thoughts so I’ll blog more.
I saw Norm Macdonald at the New York Comedy Festival this year. He kept calling vampires “draculas” as in “ladies love draculas” and talking about how being a dracula gets you tons of pussy. I (paid for and) listened to Louis’ thing without watching it and still loved it.
On the drive back to New York, I heard Todd Glass podcasting about podcasting (and about people who hate on podcasting about podcasting) and came away with more love for Todd. Todd Glass reads hate mail and usually they all seem to decide it’s a terrible idea to read hate-mail. And the hate-mail unfortunately hates on meta-podcasting, something the whole show kind of thrives on, so Todd further deconstructs (the show and criticism in general, not himself literally) to address the topic. Those who say the show lacks structure are wrong. Todd, I think, likes to start things off with a lot of deep breaths and positive energy, then he sets ideas bouncing like balls into conversation, several at once sometimes (ideas/conversations), and routinely will return to them to keep them all moving at once, and he often talks about the show he’s doing. It’s confronting and non-linear at the same time, so what? It’s the best kind of podcasting because it’s extraordinarily self-aware. The running gags are hysterically strange (“Autastic” neighbor on the trumpet; Blake the raging intern) and he plays old goofy songs like Dean Martin singing about how he hates The Beatles. It’s a kind of wild and raw show, and exciting in that way. What the hell would YOU talk about if you were making a podcast for the first time? Todd Glass and his show are terrific.
Here’s to more funny in the New Year
(I farted in the middle of writing that sentence)
