Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. Happy 4th of July, everyone! Previous entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Laughing Matters” tag. Continue reading Laughing Matters: The Kids in the Hall, “That’s America”
I recently ruminated on the vexing issue of ascribing authorship when evaluating cinema. That dilemma is even more pronounced when it comes to television programs. While we’re solidly into the era that venerates showrunners, television is undoubtedly an even more collaborative medium than film. Unless a program is being overseen by a near obsessive, such as David Milch, or a narcissistic self-sabotage artist, like Nic Pizzolatto, there’s sure to be a dizzying array of voices contributing to the creative process. One person may grab the baton and conduct, but the whole choir delivers the song. One of the satisfying pleasures of Louie, … Continue reading That Championship Season: Louie, Season Two
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. Once, while bemoaning a generation’s regrettable reliance on television rather than books as a conduit to learning, the great novelist Kurt Vonnegut had to allow for an exception to his complaint. He famously noted, “I would have rather written Cheers than anything I’ve written.” Obviously, this is no faint praise, given than it emanates from the author of some of the most justly revered novels … Continue reading Laughing Matters: “Cheers,” The Dime Bet
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. I was certain I had George Carlin all figured out. I’d been a fan since I was a little kid, when I’d do my best to blend into the furniture at adult parties I got dragged along to with the goal of listening along as the older attendees played Carlin’s comedy records. The mounting haziness and boisterous laughter of those adults thankfully prevented them from … Continue reading Laughing Matters: George Carlin, “The Planet is Fine”
When I suggest that boxing, like comedy, is about rhythm, he nods. “My trainer, Dave Paul, he said, ‘G’—he calls me G—he said, ‘G, you have an unusual rhythm of your own that’s sort of, uh, no rhythm whatsoever. And yet that works for you, because they can’t figure you out.’ So sometimes when I’m in the ring, it’s like you can’t tell whether I’m about to tell a joke, or throw a punch, or start a punch and not finish it, or pass out. So some guys can’t read me. They come in close—just like when an audience leans … Continue reading Garry Shandling, 1949 – 2016
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter matters, too. Lorne Michaels smartly maintains that everyone’s favorite Saturday Night Live cast is the one that was in place while they were in high school. The creator and longtime producer (with only a brief interruption in the early nineteen-eighties) of the venerable late night sketch comedy program is certainly correct in identifying the perception bias that compromises any individual attempt to identify one era’s superiority over … Continue reading Laughing Matters: “Saturday Night Live” Bush campaign ad, 1988
The Bob Newhart Show never won an Emmy. In fact, the seminal sitcom was almost a non-presence at the annual awards ceremony meant to identify and honor the best of the best of broadcast television. Across six seasons, The Bob Newhart Show earned a mere four nominations, and one of those was in the category of “Outstanding Film Editing in a Comedy Series.” It’s easy to attribute that to the series built around a certain button-down mind existing at the same as some of the most important, groundbreaking sitcoms in the history of television, such as All in the Family … Continue reading That Championship Season: Parks and Recreation, Season Three
As per tradition (see below), the eve of the Emmy Award nominations brings me to my own humble assertion of the best of the past year in television, using the same traditional network season timespan that the awards-giving body still prefers. As usual, plenty of caveats apply. I’m pretty well-viewed when it comes to television, but there are plenty of acclaimed series that I don’t watch. Someday, when I finally catch up on some of them, I might regret that I posted these lists without, say, Mad Men on the tally (I should’ve celebrated Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake a … Continue reading It keeps me company when nobody else is around and I’m all by myself
By now, there are enough smart, fitting adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s work to the screen — big and small — that it obscures the long, problematic history the prolific writer had when turning his work over to Hollywood. And it wasn’t from lack of trying. According to some sources, there have been over two dozen whacks at transforming Leonard’s fiction, which is lean enough to sometimes read as if it’s a script treatment, into film or television. Even though it seemed the curse was broken with 1995’s Get Shorty, a story fittingly inspired by Leonard’s dismal encounters with Hollywood studios, there … Continue reading That Championship Season: Justified, Season Two
I was just about the ideal age for Late Night with David Letterman. The program was there for me throughout my teenaged years, providing absurdist, anarchic, highly ironic comedy at the exact point that my swarming hormones made me inclined to reject staid sincerity and childish silliness. Letterman operated his show with a thin undercoating of hostility for the very showbiz conventions he was charged with upholding, and yet his jagged view of the proceedings was tempered by a Midwestern decency that was very familiar to me as I watched in my small town Wisconsin home. It was this latter quality that his bookers … Continue reading More fun than humans should be allowed to have
Coffee for Two 