Tag: Comedy

Richard Seymour on Talk Show Hosts

“The late night talk show hosts are all politically timid mummy-birds, puking up pre-masticated ideas, plucked from brain-dead newspapers, into the wide, expectant beaks of their audience. *** But they tend, on that ground, to be very sensitive to the ideological consensus they both form and, through laughter, police.”

Richard Seymour, “Ridiculous”

 

Bonus link: “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” Review

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

Universal Studios

Director: Alan Rafkin

Main Cast: Don Knotts, Joan Staley, Dick Sargent

Here is a rather mediocre film that nonetheless features a rather great performance by its star Don Knotts.  The basic premise loosely resembles the story “A Fairy Tale About a Boy Who Left Home to Learn About Fear” from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, about staying in a haunted house to win the affections of a girl.  Knotts plays Luther Heggs, an inept man working for a newspaper with aspirations to be a photojournalist.  Another reviewer aptly described the protagonist as having “delusions of adequacy.”  A recurring gag is that as Knotts fumbles about awkwardly and timidly some unidentifiable person in the back of a crowd yells, “Atta-boy Luther!”  Knotts’ finest moment comes when the small town he lives in presents a luncheon in his honor and he gives a speech.  This speech manages to include a practically exhaustive collection of every inept mistake a nervous presenter can make.  Knotts opens speaking in a whisper no one can hear.  He talks mostly about writing the speech, without actually saying much beyond that, other than to briefly pander to the audience by expressing support for the military — a complete non-sequitur.  His hands tremble uncontrollably while holding his notes.  The speech just kind of ends abruptly, without ever having made a point.  Knotts is positively brilliant in the scene.  As a whole, the film is one of those stiff Hollywood set-bound films that is only slightly more advanced in production values than a television sitcom of the day, and there just aren’t quite enough jokes/gags.  But, it is watchable and Knotts shines through the merely passable filmmaking and writing.  This also perhaps influenced Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?

Eddie the Eagle

Eddie the Eagle

Eddie the Eagle (2016)

20th Century Fox

Director: Dexter Fletcher

Main Cast: Taron Egerton, Hugh Jackman

A comedic sports biopic that is a bit too corny and hamfisted to really succeed.  It is loosely (very loosely) based on the story of real-life ski jumper Michael “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards, who was one of the most inspiring figures of the modern olympic games.  Robert S. Borden wrote in 1976, “If voting could change anything it would be made illegal!” The story of Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican bobsled team (both competed in the 1988 winter olympics) are kind of the sports corollary to that saying.  Their presence resulted in rule changes to ban almost any others from following in their footsteps.  If there was hope for anything good in the olympics, it was (and is) in athletes like Edwards, who came from a working class background and self-funded his training.  Sadly, the olympics are a bastion of corruption — from the U.S. government pulling the term “olympics” out of the public domain (privatizing the commons), to out-of-control corporate sponsorships/bribery/consumerism, to bribes and scandals with the top committees, to financial chicanery and defrauding of public budgets for funding, to wasteful construction, … ahh, the list goes on.  They might represent everything wrong with sports — though there are so many examples of dirty business in sports that there are many other contenders (FIFA, NFL, NCAA, etc., etc.!).  The world would be a better place without them all, frankly.

I still remember the real-life Eddie the Eagle jumping in the olympics.  I was in a bar or restaurant of some sort with my family.  Everyone in the place watched the TV to see Eddie the Eagle jump.

Anyway, this film is dumb but the story of the real-life Eddie the Eagle remains a great thumb in the eye of elitist twats who run the world (for now).

Anthony Jeselnik – Caligula

Caligula

Anthony Jeselnik – Caligula Comedy Central (2013)

I haven’t heard this album, per se, but I saw the TV special of the same name and presume it’s identical.  Jeselnik has a very well-defined schtick.  He delivers “conventional” jokes, rather than telling stories, etc.  His humor is based largely on misdirection, a bit like Rodney Dangerfield, etc.  But his version of misdirection takes on a new dimension.  He usually takes positions that are considered socially taboo or even undiscussable and feigns being a sociopath (as others note, just a step beyond Craig Kilborn et al.).  Often that means jokes premised on hilarious false/extremist dichotomies.  So, he implies he’s a rapist, that christianity is worse than pedophilia, and that others’ deaths and disabilities are an inconvenience to him.  Often he does this by simple grammatical errors, like substituting the present tense “has” for the past-tense “had” to send the audience a false message before the punchline of a joke.  What was kind of interesting in the TV special routine was that in the middle of the show he does this has/had joke involving his brother as a character, but then he finishes up the show with a very similar joke where he kind of “calls out” somebody else for doing essentially the same thing (using “is” instead of “was”).  Jeselnik drops hints all over the place that almost everything he says is a complete fabrication (though I wonder about his comments about being an atheist).  What I like about him is that he’s found a way to actually create some kind of rudimentary social space to discuss or at least think about some (liberal) social taboos, at least by calling attention to them.  It’s a kind of mild meta-humor that recalls Neil Hamburger just a little, but with more general social norms on the table in place of specifically comedic norms.  [Edit: it seems like Adam Kotsko‘s book Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television makes an argument similar to this review]

Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty (2013- )

Cartoon Network

Director: various

Main Cast: Justin Roiland, Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer, Sarah Chalke

Rick and Morty is a sci-fi comedy cartoon that revolves around the adventures of Rick Sanchez (Roiland) and his grandson Morty (Roiland), increasingly also joined by his granddaughter Summer (Grammer).  Rick is a kind of genius mad scientist who works out of the garage of his daughter Beth Smith (Chalke) and her husband Jerry (Parnell).  He is kind of an alcoholic, and regularly drools and belches.  He has invented the means to travel to other dimensions in which parallel versions of all the characters exist.  The characters encounter many aliens.  Most of the episodes are spoofs of popular films and TV shows.

Rick is an existentialist, convinced of his own superiority.  He travels around different universes for lulz, seemingly indifferent to consequences — other than ensuring his own safety — and enjoying whatever pleasures he can along the way.  His most abiding characteristic is a deep cynicism towards everyone and everything around him.  He fits perfectly the observation about “the secret seductive lure of cynicism: living in truth and goodness is boring; the only authentic challenge is that of Evil, that is, the only space for extraordinary achievements is to be found in transgressive idiosyncrasies.”  (Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates).  And yet the entire series is kind of about how Rick is really more than a cynic, that he has empathy and bigger plans.  But he recognizes how most people are basically just stupid or evil or both, even as they pretend or try to be otherwise.  In spite of Rick’s high intelligence, his grandson Morty — constantly ridiculed by Rick (that is, all of the Ricks of all the dimensions) as being stupid — has a higher sense of morality.  Most episodes revolve around the interplay between Rick’s intelligence run amok and Morty’s bumbling yet morally constant skepticism.  Morty regularly calls out Rick’s moral ambivalence and the pair almost rights all the wrongs they commit — as the seasons progress, there is much wreckage accumulated from their past adventures.

What sets the show apart from many others, cartoon or live action, is the psychological depth of the characters.  In spite of the zany sci-fi plots, usually absurdist takes on familiar pop culture films, TV shows, etc., Rick’s moral shortcomings are generally called out and he grudgingly redresses them.  In one episode from season two, “The Ricks Must be Crazy,” the show offers a (sideways) critique of capitalism and accumulation of power, told through a story about Rick creating a miniature universe (“microverse”) inside his vehicle’s battery, with the universe’s inhabitants decived into creating electricity for him.  The season three episode “The Rickshank Rickdemption” (based on The Shawshank Redemption), has Rick (supposedly) inventing all his gadgets to find a way to recreate a limited-time fast-food dipping sauce created to promote a movie.  So, this presents him not as a simple hedonist, but someone who enjoys simple pleasures that come along tangentially in his adventures seeking the mythic sauce.  It is about avoiding being imprisoned by illusions, as Beth and Jerry seem to be.

This is one of the best and smartest shows on TV, due to the great characters, the intriguing parody/satire plots, and (especially) the biting critique of cynicism.