Each of these guys is a standup comic, but each is perhaps best known for (perhaps slightly embarassing) television series. Chris was the host of MTV's "Singled Out" in the early 1990s, a job which he followed up with a stint hosting the syndicated dating show "Shipmates." Patton is the co-star of CBS TV's "The King of Queens," a sitcom in the much maligned fat-guy-hot-wife genre. It's definately the best of those, though.
Chris is half of the music duo Hard N Phirm, who have often been heard on The Sound. He's also due to perform alongside KG from Tenacious D in a musical called "Rock of Ages," which features some of the "great" hair metal tunes of the 1980s.
One of my favorite shows in our history, certainly one of the funniest.
KERA-TV in Dallas was the first PBS station to broadcast Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it was the Pythons' first stop in the US after the premier of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Los Angeles in 1975. This interview footage first aired live on KERA that year, and hasn't been seen by the public since. It was discovered on an old reel that had been saved by an engineer, and as you can see, it cuts off after about 14 minutes... the engineer taped over the rest. It's a look at the group being candidly questioned by fans at the peak of their fame and creative powers.
Please share this blog link, but understand that KERA and the Python folks retain the rights to their footage, so please refrain from redistributing the file itself.
My thanks go to KERA in Dallas for sharing the footage with us, especially to Kim and Bill Young, who made the arrangements. Also to the Python organization for giving us clearance to share the Flying Circus footage seen in the clip. Also, thanks to Tyler MacNiven and Jessica Jardine for their help shooting the introduction. Like this post? Click here to subscribe to the blog.
The always-wonderful Eugene Mirman has a new post up on his "Hello. I'm Eugene." blog. He takes on the heady topic of the Iraq war with typical Mirman aplomb.
Many of you were too young to remember when the second Iraqi war broke out a few years ago. You were probably still glued to Kurt Loder on MTV announcing that the latest Green Day influenced band was finally at maximum handsomeness.
It took NBC/Uni quite a while to get Newsradio DVDs in the pipeline, and when they did, series creator Paul Simms supposedly pulled it out of the pipeline for a while to add extras, but they're here, and they're wonderful. Season 3 just became available, and Season 1 & 2 have been available for some time.
Newsradio was an astonishingly underappreciated show in it's time. It had a loyal and significant following, but it was overshadowed by Seinfeld in the press and on NBC. Seinfeld was a game-changing show, but Newsradio may have been the second best sitcom of the 90s.
On last week's Sound of Young America, Andy Daly talked about how difficult it is to be a great straight man. Dave Foley's effortless work on Newsradio made it look easy. The best TV straightman since Newhart, says I. It's tough to get laughs working against the wackos, and Foley did it consistently.
And that's to say nothing of the wonderful work done by the rest of the cast. Phil Hartman was of course the most heralded among them, but everyone else deserves kudos as well. Andy Dick did the most consistently excellent work of his life as dim-witted cub reporter Matthew. Stephen Root was stunningly fantastic as the bombastic boss Mr. James. Maura Tierney and Khandi Alexander both got tremendous humor out of their sometimes-straight-woman, sometimes-nutty-woman roles. Even final season additions Jon Lovitz and Patrick Warburton distinguished themselves.
I had the chance to drive Dave Foley around for SF Sketchfest 2006, and we talked a bit about the show. He described it as the best job he'd ever had, and a joy to be a part of. It was certainly a joy to watch.
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Great lineup for this week's Comedy Death Ray at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles. Thye bill includes our pal Jasper Redd (pictured), one of the best comics to come out of San Francisco in the past few years.
The show's tonight: Tuesday, February 28th. For more info, check out FunBunchComedy.com. You can make reservations here.
There's been quite a bit of invective flying around the blogosphere on the subject of The Clipse (and their ilk) and the Indie Rock Community. Pitchfork Media, the website reviled by every indie elitist for being so absurdly indie elitist, has made some moves towards hip-hop recently, not least of which was picking The Clipse's "We Got It For Cheap: Vol. 2" mixtape as one of the best albums of 2005.
For those who don't know, the Clipse are a rap duo from Virginia Beach, affiliated with superprodcers The Neptunes. Their big hit, "Grindin'" was typical of their near-total lyrical obsession with cocaine dealing. They are the kind of guys who brag about learning to deal drugs as small children from their grandmother.
Anyway, the charge against the indie hipsters from the hip-hop hipsters goes something like this:
For a long time, the rock intellegentsia was uncomfortable with hip-hop. They were OK with Public Enemy (political lyrics, noisy beats), and some were into the whole Native Tongues thing (presence of jazz, less mean stuff). Then when hip-hop hit the mid-90s P. Diddy era, they checked out.
Indie rock & the rock snobs embraced hip-hop in the late 90s, with the "alternative" hip-hop movement, which decended from the Native Tongues. Folks like Mos Def, Talib Kweli, et al. Later on, folks like Jurassic 5 and Black Eyed Peas took this thread and made it astonishingly corny, but the indie rockers notice for a while -- they didn't actually care about hip-hop any more than they cared about country music when they owned a couple Johnny Cash compilations and that Loretta Lynn CD that Jack White produced.
Of course, eventually, the indie rockers figured out that BEP and J5 weren't "cool." So they dropped them like a hot potato (there are still some J5 holdouts, but whatever). Their quest to find "authentic" hip-hop took them towards white rappers, like Aesop Rock and Sage Francis, who made up for their lack of flow/voice/blackness with complex lyrics and a lot of talk about how hip-hop they were.
At some point, the hipsters figured out that this white rapper stuff was distinctly uncool (this whole time, they were thinking the opposite). So they switched up. All of a sudden, they were advocating for new twists on hyper-traditional street hip-hop, stuff like Camron and the Diplomats, and the Clipse. This was "authentic hip-hop," in their eyes. This allowed them to like Jay-Z (or at least Reasonable Doubt), even though his music was good to dance to, and Beanie Sigel even though it was violet but not revolutionary. And that's where we stand today. End scene.
The argument on the hip-hop side is that this represents some kind of racism on the part of the indie rockers. They're defining blackness or authenticity in association with drug dealing and violence. Then they're living vicariously through this blackness/danger, like everybody's always saying 15-year-old white suburbanites do with 50 Cent records.
My personal inclination is to agree with the hip-hop side, but as a white guy, who hangs out with indie rockers most of the time, I feel like I have a bit of insight into it.
Indie Rock critics are used to tremendously shattered genres. Shoegaze-agro-jazzcore or whatever. They've also developed, over the past thirty five years, a very specific perspective that allows them to glorify pop music as an art (which was tough, especially in the beginning).
One of the things that gets rock critics off is aesthetic purity. Robert Johnson is 1000% Robert Johnson. The Sex Pistols are 1000% the Sex Pistols. Johnny Cash is 1000% Johnny Cash. They reward artists that find their genre niche, their identity niche, and really do the s**t out of it. When this idea moves from Pioneers like the above to the super-sub genres, it means doing the heck out of those super-sub genres... the Strokes got famous for really really being The Strokes, even if what that is is kind of limited. (I don't mean to suggest that derivativeness is part of this, although it can be).
This thinking oftend doesn't translate all that well to hip-hop. Hip-hop records and artists tend to be very self-contradictory -- that's part of their appeal. Thug/lover archetypes popularized by LL and later Tupac, for example. Rapping and singing on the same track ala Ja Rule and 50 Cent. Hip-hop artists also tend to want to appeal to a broad audience. Most of Jay-Z's records have lots of different sounds, and lots of different ideas of what Jay-Z is (gangsta, dealer, lover, party animal, etc).
There are of course artists with very specific and clear identities and aesthetic focuses... and guess what? They're the ones being celebrated these days. The Clipse are the perfect example of this. They have this thing they do -- which is be snide and scary and rap about drugs. They do it GREAT. Camron and the Dipset are the same, plus an added aesthetic distinction -- they have a very unique and interesting style.
Of course, this idea really helped a lot of past rock critics' darlings, too. Kool Keith leaps to mind. The Def Jux-y guys. Jurassic Five even.
I think the main difference now vs. three years ago is that rock critics are getting more comfortable with the idomatics of hip-hop. There was a time that they could only deal with the anger if it was "political." They're getting over that. Most of the critics darlings still have either very hard, agro sounds or softer, native-tonguesy sounds, but that's changing too. And everybody likes Kanye, right?
I guess my thesis here is that there is some racial weirdness in this, but it's less than it once was, not more. This is more of a symptom of a classic problem -- applying rock standards to another genre/culture. But it's a step in the right direction.
Great piece in today's Times about Steven Colbert's quest to interview 434 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives. (Colbert says Rep. Randy Cunningham of California (R) is "dead to me").
Colbert's already talked one congressman into punching him, and another into allowing Colbert to comb his moustache.
I was a little dissapointed to read that Barney Frank of Massachusetts, one of the funniest congressman (a slight distinction no doubt), was the only one who said he wouldn't do it again. He said Colbert was "Two Stooges short of a good routine." Bah humbug. If you didn't want him to make fun of your gayness, Barney, maybe you shouldn't have gotten caught with that male prostitute.
One of the odd transformations that the Daily Show franchise has undergone over the course of the Stewart Administration is away from the Ali-G-esque "we're real reporters" act of the early days, and towards complex comedy set pieces. Actually, they've lately been moving away from field reports all together in favor of studio bits like "This Week in God."
There's no doubt that Stewart is a wonderful TV host, who manages to be both likeable and snarky, a tough task. And the folks the Daily Show hires are almost without exception fantastic. But whent he subjects are in on the act, the whole thing loses a bit of it's power, doesn't it?
Personally, I'm very excited about a show called American Lives, coming to Comedy Central this summer. It stars, among others, past Sound guests Zach Galifianakis and Matt Walsh, as a fictional newsteam, travelling the country interviewing real people and having semi-improvised interactions. It's produced by one of the fellas behind Ali G, and it sounds like a winner to me. Walsh is one of the best straight men in the business, and as Galifianakis showed in the Comedians of Comedy, he's an amazing talent, whose comic live wire act is totally engrossing.
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Debate has been raging on the internet over the authenticity of Karl Pilkington, the Ricky Gervais Show co-host whose idiotic ramblings are fodder for the scorn of Gervais and Steven Merchant.
Matt (aka Sasquatch) over at ASpecialThing breaks it down, and quite reasonably, I think:
No one's saying he's completely oblivious to the fact that people find his idiotic ramblings funny -- obviously he's smart enough to know that if the way he's acting and talking makes a world-famous comedian laugh and want to keep talking to him, then he should keep it up. That's not even smarts, that's human nature: when you crave attention (as every human does to some degree) and a certain behavior results in you getting attention, you will keep up that behavior and even amplify it (kids and bad comics do this all the time, which is why they're annoying).
Does he really believe every bit of Monkey News? No. But he believes some of it, and believed a lot of it at some point I bet -- now it's a segment they have to fill, and he understands his role is to read the stuff as if he thinks it's real. Is that "doing a character?" If it is, then every person is doing a character at some point in his life, whenever he has to tell a white lie to spare someone's feelings or pretend to be excited by a project at work that is, in fact, total crap. That said, some people are inconceivably gullible and believe everything they read until someone points out the inconsistencies. I think Karl could be one of those people. Above all, he WANTS to believe stupid urban myths and conspiracy theories.
Bottom line: he is self-aware and understands his place on the show, so he gives Gervais, Merchant and the audience what he knows they all want, even if it's an exaggeration of his personality. Even if it means taking the abuse he's given for his views without complaint.
The Sound of Young America unknowingly broke this story a month or two ago when H. Jon Benjamin was on the show, but Comedy Central made it official today. Dr. Katz is finally coming to DVD May 9th.
"Dr. Katz Professional Therapist: Season One" is a one disc set featuring all six episodes. The release also contains the following: "Shrink Wrapped," an original Squigglevision short; "Short Attention Span Theater" shorts; "The Biography of Mr. Katz," the animated original pitch idea to the network; and audio commentaries from comedians Dave Attell, Ray Romano, H. Jon Benjamin (Dr. Katz's son, Ben), series star and co-creator Jonathan Katz and co-creator Tom Snyder.
Comedians who appeared on the couch in the first season include Dave Attell, Joy Behar, Bill Braudis, Anthony Clark, Dom Irrera, Laura Kightlinger, Andy Kindler, Wendy Liebman, Larry Miller and Ray Romano.
Ray Romano's appearances on Dr. Katz are about as good as it gets, if you ask me. People complain about Romano because they associate him with the very traditional Everybody Loves Raymond, but the fact is that he's one of the funniest guys in the world, and his style is wonderfully suited to the Dr. Katz format.
Why are you standing on the left? Why have you suddenly stopped walking, causing me to bump into you? Why is your luggage blocking my way? Why can't you learn some escalator etiquette?
Have you ever read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin? If you haven't, it's great. Not only is he a great writer, and very funny, he's so full of s**t that you get double the laughs-per-page. Most of his baloney, though, is *very* New Sincerity.
When he was 20, he made a chart of the 13 virtues he wanted to have in his journal. Then, at the end of each day, he would check off the virtues he'd displayed that day. He kept score and tracked his progress over time, until he found that chastity was kind of a bummer, and bailed on the whole thing.
Check out our Rockets show (MP3 Link), wherein I discuss the chart with Josh Kornbluth, who (in addition to being a public TV personality) has traveled the nation performing the monologue "Ben Franklin: Unplugged," which details his search for the "real" Franklin.
MTV2 just announced a premier date for season two (and season one on DVD) of Wonder Showzen, which was probably the best TV comedy to premier last year. Expect DVDs on March 28th, with season two premiering March 31st. (Looks like the creators will be on The Sound of Young America, too, knock on wood.)
Wonder Showzen is an angry, brilliant, borderline anarchist deconstruction of kids television (it was originally titled "Kids Show"). It's not a particularly new concept (it's a lot like Robert Smigel's "TV Funhouse"), but it's fantastically well executed. It gets at more than just the banality of kids' TV, which is a fat target; it also gets at hypocrisies, banalities, and small sadnesses in broader American life.
This segment, called "Beat Kids," visits the horse racing track, and the contrast between the sweet little kid and his mean, sad words is amazing.
Once in a while on the show, the meanness overwhelms the funny, but the hit ratio is pretty high. It's hard to maintain this kind of thing, but I think they've got a shot at it. I'm interested to see where the show goes from here, and I'm guessing it may blow up.
This post, though, is really about something broader than just Wonder Showzen. It's about good shows and bad people.
Remember when South Park first premiered? What a breath of fresh air it was. That first time you saw the show, it blew your mind.
But then it started to catch fire... and all of a sudden, when you thought South Park, you didn't think of the great, subversive humor. You thought of a-holes doing Cartman impressions. The worst parts of the show were the ones that were picked up by the mainstream, and it truly changed the meaning of the show. South Park is still going strong (financially and creatively, for the most part), but even now I can barely watch it.
Watching Dave Chappelle on Oprah, I got the feeling he ran into this same wall -- and since he's a standup, it hit him square in the face. He realized he wasn't writing his show for "us" anymore, he was now writing it for "them." In his case, of course, this has racial implications as well.
Black Studies scholars have spent a lot of time working on this idea of cultural production for "us" and cultural production for "them." I'd give you citations, but I'm at work. Chappelle's liberal use of the n-word, for example, has a very different meaning if the audience is "in" than if the audience is "out." When he stood on stage, trying to practice his art, and he heard 29 frat boys yelling "I'm Rick James, Bitch!," he flipped. For two years, he'd been writing an "us" show, and he realized in a flash it had become a "them" show. Not only might the satire (like the Black White Supremicist) be flying over the new audience's head, but the tossed off racial burlesque stuff (like say, the Mad Real World) was reaching an audience that wouldn't understand it, and could interpret it in racist ways. When he started work on the third season, he didn't know what to do about that, and he freaked.
We'll see if Wonder Showzen really does take off, and we'll see what effect it has on the show. As their audience changes, will they change? Will the new audience be there for the satire, or simply be attracted to the "outrageousness?" Does Wonder Showzen have more satire in the tank, or will they start to substitute easy shock for tough truth? Tune in March 31st, and find out.
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When I was in college, a guy down the hall from me was interviewed for a man-on-the-street feature in the school paper. The question was "What would you do if there were no laws for one day?"
He responded, "Shoot the president."
It turns out that threatening to kill the president is really, really illegal. The Secret Service practically busted down the doors to our building trying to get to this guy, who was just kidding. He came very close to being expelled.
That not-seen-since-1975 Monty Python footage is on it's way. I was up late last night with my good friend Tyler MacNiven, director of the film Kintaro Walks Japan, getting it ready. Expect iPod-ready video coming down the pipe tommorow or Wednesday, and web-ready video here around the same time.
In the meantime, check out Tyler's film. It's a feature-length travelogue about the six months he spent walking from one end of Japan to the other (the long way). He did it to impress his (Japanese-English) sweetheart, and to find the place where his father Jamis, founder of Buck's of Woodside, was born. He was armed with only a sketch of shoreline his grandmother had made, but he found it.
It's a pretty beautiful and inspirational story, full of humor and verve, with a dash of myth thrown in for good measure. Tyler is an amazing guy, the warmest person I've ever met, and he makes more friends along the way than you can imagine. He literally made the film himself -- he used a consumer camera, and shot and edited the whole thing without help (except when he gave the camera over to folks along the road, so they could shoot him). It's really a remarkable achievement.
Tyler recently completed CBS' "The Amazing Race," (it debuts Tuesday night) so I'm hoping that will bring some more light to the film. He sells it over the web, and you can also watch the whole thing on Google Video. He also told me you'll be able to watch it on business-class American Airlines flights to Japan, so if you've got an extra couple grand, that's a good way to see it, too.
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"Rust, a fungus disease, sapped the
wheat crop. Production of durum wheat dropped from the 10-year average
of 31,547,000 bushels a year to 4,976,000 bushels."
