My Fellow Comedists,
Following up on yesterday's post, it is well worth posting some photos of the counter-protesters who have begun showing up alongside Reverend Fred Phelp's travelling circus.
Others you've found?
Live, love (everyone), and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
This week we sadly lost Greg Giraldo. A New York lawyer turned stand-up, he was one of the few who managed to take a really, really hard life dedicated to an art and turn it into a straight job. A very smart writer with a rock solid delivery, he became the epitome of post-Seinfeld stand-up comedy; never a household name, but the go-to guy when a tv show needed a scruffy-looking stand-up comedian. Whether it was his gig as a judge on Last Comic Standing or any of the dozen or so spots he held on shows for Comedy Central, he always worked as the quintessential professional comedian of the early 2000s.
He died this week after an overdose of prescription medication left him in a persistent vegetative state and his family took him off of life support. Good-bye Greg, and thanks for all the laughs.
Here's a routine of his from Montreal:
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
We just had Yom Kippur, the day when Jews around the world ask for forgiveness for their sins. (Leave it to the Jews to make the holiest day of the year a time set aside to feel guilty.) Catholics have confession and I was just listening the other day to Jim Gaffigan's take on confession -- "My wife keeps telling me I need to go to confession. It's been a long time. Now don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't enjoy lying to a holy man." And it struck me that we Comedists also need some means of absolution for our Comedist failings. We need an appropriate day. I was thinking of February 25th, Carrot Top's birthday, but I'll leave it open to suggestions.
Anyway, it seemed that in lieu of a formal day, we ought to have at least a post where we can air out our humorous sins and clear our consciences.
I will admit that I stifled a joke this week. I was driving the short people to school and as we passed a stable near us, the shorter of the short people read aloud a new sign that said "Weddings on horseback" and asked what it means. I thought it, but failed to say, "It means there will be more than one nag at the ceremony." Saint Shecky, please forgive me.
My fellow Comedists, where have you come up short?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
A brief metaphysical quandary this weekend (with apologies to Shulamith Oppenheim):
What is a full professor full of?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
On this, the 9th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it's all over the news that the Dove World Outreach Center led by the Dr. Rev. Terry Jones is threatening to mark the date by burning copies of the Koran. While this act of hatred and bigotry ought to disturb everyone, it is especially offensive to Comedists who remember Terry Jones without the southern accent and white biker moustache, back when he was a member of Monty Python. Maybe playing a woman so frequently left him vulnerable to the homophobia of the Christian right. Maybe his roles as an upper-crust clueless businessman left him with sympathies for the well-heeled. Whatever the reason for his change from intellectual, irreverent comic to intolerant fundamentalist attention-seeker, we are deeply saddened and choose to remember Terry Jones as he was...a smart, funny man in a dress.
Remember, Terry Jones, he's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
A theological question today. Jokes can be linguistic -- A pirate and the Pope walk into a bar... -- or non-linguistic -- e.g., practical jokes. But what about puns? I'm wearing my favorite t-shirt today, a gift from good brother YKW which features this on the front:
Clearly a pun, does not have words. But is the pun in the words or is it in the translation back into words when you explain it to yourself? Can a pun be non-linguistic? The duck/rabbit 
or old woman/young woman
are often called optical illusions, but are they also puns?
What about Escher's tessellations?
Do puns have to be verbal? Other examples?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
This weekend is the feast of Saint Gary. Gary Larson turns 60. Creator of The Far Side, the most consistently clever comic strip ever. A couple classics:
Your favorite?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
We have a wonderful video store, a dying breed, the sort where you can still rent video tapes and can find movies you haven't seen in twenty years that you loved back when. Looking through the stacks, I came across the DVD of the six episodes of "Police Squad." It seemed like the perfect time to introduce the short people to the work of my heroes Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.
They launched their career with the cult classic, "Kentucky Fried Movie," a series of odd little sketches that spoofed everything from Japanese kung fu films to high school science films and was a bit more risque than the material to come.
It set up their second film, "Airplane!" With a relentless style, ZAZ showed themselves to be the WalMart of comedy, quantity, quantity, quantity: no joke too cheap, no pun too bad, and no sight gag too cheesy. They get you going and never let you stop.
"Airplane!" led to "Top Secret!" ("Airplane 2" was not written by ZAZ, but by Ken Finkleman, who also wrote that great work of American cinema, "Grease 2.") a spoof of Elvis and James Bond films starring Val Kilmer and including the line "Sunday? That's Simchas Torah!" I believe which ought to be more widely quoted.
They took their work to the small screen with "Police Squad," but only six episodes were shot and only three aired. ZAZ had a feud with the networks demanding that they not use a laugh track because it threw off the timing and their ability to do rapid fire jokes. But the networks believed the American public too stupid to be able to figure out for themselves when to laugh and the show was canned. It did give rise to a series of three films, all good, but not as good as the show.
Their last work together was "Ruthless People" a more mainstream sort of comedy in which a nice middle class couple in trouble kidnaps a the wife of a wealthy businessman who unbeknownst to them hates her. Best line of the film is when the husband played by Danny DeVito refuses to pay the ransom in order to get his wife killed and the kidnappers, played by Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater send back a demand for less money. The wife, played by Bette midler, goes bananas screaming, "I'm being marked down?! Who was I kidnapped by? KMart?"
Great stuff top to bottom. This weekend's question -- favorite ZAZ scene?
I've got to go with this one (start at 5:30):
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
This week sees the feast of Saint Lucy, the 99th anniversary of the birth of Lucille Ball. Born in upstate New York, she moved frequently as a child because of her father's job until he died and she was sent to live with her grandparents back in New York state. Her grandfather loved vaudeville and frequently took Lucy to see performances.
When she dropped out of high school and started dating the son of a gangster, her mother shipped her to the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City, but only lasted a few weeks. She decided to go into show business the hard way and found work as a chorus girl, a fashion model, and ultimately the poster-girl for chesterfield cigarettes. Trying and failing to make it into parts on Broadway, she moved to L.A. where she got a small part in one of Eddie Cantor's movies which led to a non-stop string of bit parts that included work with The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers. these turned into larger parts and she became "the Queen of the B movies."
But then she made the move to radio and in 1947, she became Liz Cugat, the wacky housewife in "My Favorite Husband," which in many cases became her later tv show word for word. CBS was in the midsts of populating its new television network with versions of its successful radio shows and Lucy demanded that "My Favorite Husband" have one major chance, the husband on tv would be her real life husband, Desi Arnaz, who as a bandleader was always on the road straining their marriage. At first, the network balked because the idea of a white woman and a Cuban husband was worrisome to them in 1950. But Lucy displayed the toughness in the boardroom she would need later and got her way and "I Love Lucy" was born.
The success was unparalleled. They formed Desilu Studios which gave Lucy complete creative control and she created years of the best comedy on television for a decade. "I Love Lucy" in some ways launches many of the standard aspects of modern situational comedy, but is also the end of vaudeville recycling some classic bits for the next generation. Clever writing combined with slapstick, Lucy did it all. She became the first woman to run a studio in Hollywood and was known as a tough negotiator and a careful and caring boss turning out hits like "Mission: Impossible" and "Star Trek."
But it was Lucy Ricardo that makes her immortal. One word: Vitameatavegemin.
what's your favortie Lucy moment?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
This week is the feast day of Saint Red -- not to be confused with Saint Redd. Red Skelton was the son of a clown. His father passed away while his mother was pregnant with him, but at a young age, he too became a clown. Selling newspapers as a 15 year old to bring in money for the family, vaudeville legend Ed Wynn who happened to be in town spotted him and added him to his traveling troupe. Skelton worked everywhere he could, eventually joining the circus his father had worked for years earlier. The training never left him. He went on to star in films, on radio and television, but while he did sketch and stand-up, he was always a clown. Not one for clever, witty, and subtle language, his trade was his face which he would change and change back with lightning speed.
He created a number of characters, most memorably Clem Kadiddlehopper, the blank staring, dim witted country bumpkin. Skelton was convinced that the voice for Bullwinkle the Moose was a Kaddiddlehopper impersonation and considering suing, but ended up not.
He was a comic of a by-gone age, physical and silly.
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
TheWife and I took the kids up to Cooperstown this week and in the gift shop I saw an amazing t-shirt:
T-shirts are a classic Comedist medium. My favorite was red with a black image of Groucho, Harpo and Chico with the caption, "Sure, I'm a Marxist."
This week's question to those who also spent many hours with the Northern Sun catalogs (back when we had catalogs) -- what's the funniest t-shirt you've ever seen?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
Like we ever need an excuse to add this:
My Fellow Comedists,
It is time to once again pass the plate. Other religions ask you to donate money, but we Comedists tithe jokes. So dig deep and be generous. This weekend is my wedding anniversary, so what better time to ask for marriage and relationship jokes?
My contribution is a classic:
A husband and wife were drinking their coffee after breakfast when the wife asks, "If I died, would you remarry?" Not looking up from his paper, the husband says, "What?" "If I died, would you remarry?" "I don't know. I guess." "Would you live in the house?" she asks. "I don't know," says the husband, "I guess. It's paid for. Why buy another house?" "Would you sleep in our bed?" she asks. "You have to sleep somewhere, it's just a bed." "Would you let her use my golf clubs?" "No." he said decisively. "You would live with her in our house and sleep with her in our bed, but you wouldn't let her use my golf clubs?" "No," replied the husband, "she's left-handed."
So, take my wife, please, or at least take this opportunity to give us your best relationship joke.
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
This weekend is July 4th, not only the birthday of the United States of America and our own Gwydion, but also cartoonist Rube Goldberg. A native of San Francisco, he attended Berkeley and worked for a short period as an engineer before becoming a cartoonist. After a brief stint as a stand-up comic on the Vaudeville circuit, he worked for San Francisco papers drawing a number of strips including Mike and Ike after which the candy was named, and drew political cartoons which during the lead up to and during World War II earned him such hate mail that he had his sons change their names for safety's sake.
But he is most famous for his drawings of the inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts (a play on his own middle name, Lucius). It is for these cartoons in which simple tasks were accomplished automatically through incredibly complicated multi-step machines often including bombs, mice, and bowling balls that his name has become an adjective. He won the Pulitzer Prize as well as many other awards for these strips and the cartoonists' award, "The Reuben" is named for him (although the sandwich is not). Here's one from the Rube Goldberg site showing the easy way to tee up a golf ball:
It is a little known fact that Rube Goldberg wrote a film script, Soup to Nuts, which not only featured a number of his machines brought to life (he was also a sculptor and the scuptures in the second clip are Goldberg's own work), but also featured for the first time on screen Shemp and Moe Howard and Larry Fine. Yes, it was Rube Goldberg who gave us the Three Stooges.
From all of us who love your strips, the Stooges, and the board game Mouse Trap, thanks Rube.
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
This week marks the 60th anniversary of the invasion of South Korea by the communist North. For historians, this is a key moment in the heating up of the Cold War. For Comedists, the Korean police action brings one thing to mind -- M*A*S*H.
The 1970 movie was ostensively about a mobile army surgical hospital in Korea during the conflict, but it's real subject was Vietnam. Written by Ring Lardner, the Academy Award winning screen writer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy madness, it did something Hollywood rarely did, turn a critical eye towards war. War and soldiers were untouchable heroes, the brave men defending liberty and war films glorified battle itself and those who fought in it. But M*A*S*H followed Duck Soup in making the war itself seem as absurd as the characters in the film. (Yes, Laurel and Hardy were in the French Foreign Legion and Abbott and Costello were in the army, but the hijinx there never questioned the nature of war, just put misfits or con men in military situations.)
It made the move to the small screen two years later when Larry Gelbart (one of the collection of comic geniuses who wrote for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows) developed the concept along with the director of the film version the all around genius Robert Altman, and Gene Reynolds, and it changed television sitcoms forever. Among the innovations was plot architecture. Early episodes followed the template for all other sit coms. Strange circumstances arise, jokes are made as it works itself out. But Gelbart's wife remarked to him in an off-hand manner that the show lacked realism because life never has only one thing happening. From that point on, the show always featured parallel plot lines, much like a soap opera, in which you had two stories being told at the same time, interweaving, finding a common conclusion at the end of the episode. After M*A*S*H this became the standard approach to sitcom writing.
The writers also led the initial charge against the laugh track, arguing that the audience was smart enough to know what was funny. They won a partial victory, being allowed to omit the pre-recorded laughter in some scenes and leaving it out altogether in certain more serious episodes.
The theme song of both the movie and tv series, "Suicide is Painless" was written by Johnny Mandel, an Academy Award and Grammy winning composer and is one of the more ironic pieces of film music. When Robert Altman approach Mandel to write the music for the film, Mandel decided that the theme should be as absurd as the war it was discussing. At the time, Altman's 14 year old son fancied himself a folk singer in the Bob Dylan mold. So Mandel asked him to write lyrics, figuring whatever a junior high school kid would think is deep would indeed sound absurd. And so Michael Mandel's lyrics became the basis for the song which earned him millions of dollars thereafter with lyrics that many held to be "so deep." If that isn't ironic enough, the money he made from the song was many times more than his father, the master director, made from the film in which it appears.
So, the question for this week is what was the best and/or funniest M*A*S*H episode? I say it was "Dear Sigmund" in which Sidney Freedman, the psychiatrist who appeared from time to time, writes a letter to Freud describing the coping mechanisms of the staff.
Others?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
The Vatican has declared "The Blues Brothers" as "Catholic Classic". Of course, we considered this masterpiece a "Comedist Classic" long before, but we welcome our Catholic brethren to party even if Jake does see the light at a Protestant service. I now expect that instead of the usual Eucharist wafers, Catholics will be taking communion with rubber biscuits.
So this week's question is, "Blues Brothers," what's the best scene?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
So TheWife has been beginning to think about dogs. Mixed breeds are much healthier than pure breeds and in terms of intelligence and shedding, poodles are a great dog to work into a mix. As a result, we now have lots of poodle mixes which are not only great pets, but wonderfully funny names. Cross a collie and a poodle, get a cadoodle. Cross a Maltese and a poodle, get a malti-poo. Cross a giant schnauzer with a poodle and get a giant schnoodle. I don't even want to know what they call a shih tzu/poodle mix.
So this week's question, what is the funniest dog breed name?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
One of my favorite books is Stephen Pile's The Book of Heroic Failures which is itself magnificently funny, but made even more so by the fact that this title is the one given by its American publisher who changed the name from the infinitely better British version, The Incomplete Book of Failures. It reminds one that the British definition of irony is when a proposition impies the opposite of its literal meaning, whereas the American definition of irony is the property of being like iron.
What makes this book great is that it chronicles human failures. Some small, some magnificent in their scale, others as the result of arrogance in the face of challenge, and still others that you only see once you turn the corner. But one and all these tales are deeply satisfying. In his introduction, Pile gets it right, to fail is to be human. Everyone once in a while, he says, a Segovia does slip through the cracks and we all make sandwiches and sit and listen to him, but the rest of us are the ones who could never quite get that G chord right and spend our time trying to shake the pick out of that little hole. Humans are wired to optimists. We irrationally believe more positive outcomes to be more likely than they are. And as a result, while this leads to advancements that otherwise would not be made, it also means that we fail, flub, and flounder more often.
And, in a way, we appreciate it. The most memorable softball team I ever played on lost our first game 42-0. It was that last touchdown that really killed us. Losing a close ballgame is a heart-breaker, but losing 42-0 is actually fun in a strange way. Possibly the funniest radio moment ever is this one from This American Life chronicling the way a production of Peter Pan turned into a fiasco. If you've never heard it, do yourself a favor.
But they come in smaller varieties as well. As YKW will refer to, after a Dead show in the mid-80s, we all filtered through the chaos of the parking lot and getting in my car to go home I started it up. But something was wrong. The headlights were much dimmer than they should have been. Was there a problem with my battery? Were we going to get stuck in the line trying to leave the venue, holding up everyone? Would it conk out on the highway leaving us stranded? I had a car full of friends and it was late. This wasn't good. After vocally wringing my hands for a good five minutes about the problem, I realized it wasn't the lights that were dim. We arrived at the show early in the day and had never taken off my sunglasses. Trying to subtly change back into my regular spectacles, I was caught and thoroughly embarrassed.
So, what was your funniest worst moment?
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
This is graduation weekend for us and that means commencement speeches. Usually the epitome of boring, they can be funny. Here is Sascha Baron Cohen giving the commencement address at Harvard:
What's the best or worse commencement address you've seen?
Congrats 2010 grads.
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
My Fellow Comedists,
Philosophers working in the traditions of Judeo-Christian have put forward what has come to be called the cosmological argument in which observations of an orderly universe are used to argue that a Creator god must exist. We Comedists have the comicological argument in which we cite examples of irony and absurdity as evidence for the existence of the Cosmic Comic. This week ought to leave no doubt.
Last week, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, held that the explosion that caused the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was a work of God. He received derision for the claim, but I think he was right. How else could you explain the fact that we were handed the world's easiest current events pun, "spill, baby, spill"?
This week, it only got better. We had Republicans in the Senate arguing that we should not ban people on the no-fly list from buying guns. Sure, they are too dangerous to be allowed on airplanes, but what could possibly go wrong with allowing people we have good reason to believe are enemies of the state to arm themselves? Lindsay Graham's argument for this -- and I am not making this up -- is that the Founding Fathers were clear about firearms in the Second amendment, but said nothing about air travel since they couldn't have predicted the invention of the airplane.
Speaking of absurdity and terrorism, we've got to mention Faisal Shahzad, the keystone kop of the jihad set. Not only did he use the wrong kind of fertilizer, but he was taped parking his getaway car, but then took public transportation back to Connecticut because he accidentally left the keys to his car inside the van he was trying to blow up. You can just see him, nervous about the explosives, trying to set everything up, leaving walking to the getaway vehicle, reaching into his pocket, trying the other pocket, jacket, back to the original pocket, and then realizing -- oh no, did I leave them in..., oh no. Do I have time to go back and, no, oh, man, how much cash do I have on me? It's like the sequel to Woody Allen's Bananas.
Finally, we have to mention this one. With all the calls for the Vatican to investigate longstanding problems in the clergy, finally they are indeed acting.
"Three Catholic women's communities in Washington state are being investigated by the Vatican. They were chosen for review as part of an extensive investigation into American nuns. The Vatican says it's following up on complaints of feminism and activism."Better nip that in the bud, after all, patriarchy has worked out so well for them.
My Fellow Comedists,
A bit late for my annual Saint Shecky's Day offering, here are a couple new sets from a show I mc'ed at The Junction. Comedy on the first one starts about 2 minutes in and features what I believe to be the only dirty non-Abelian group theory joke.
Smart jokes:
An abbreviated verison of my holidays set:
Live, love, and laugh,
Irreverend Steve
