I finished watching Frasier over lockdown - the miserable tale of a self-destructive incel - and decided to continue watching old American sitcoms. I thought Cheers was a hellish dystopia populated with malicious tormentors. So now on to MAS*H. It's hailed as a masterpiece of comedy. But, really, it's an exercise in military propaganda. The […]
Ismo is a comedian from my home town, Jyväskylä, Finland. Couple of years ago he made a breakthrough in the US when he got to perform at Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Ismo’s jokes are literal (often Leslie Nielsen type of stupid-literal-dad-joke level stuff), witty, he rarely uses any profanity in his stuff. Most of all he doesn’t do politics or offensive stuff, he does not need it. He loves to play with words and fuck with the American people. The funniest thing is, in Finland he also has the same setlist, just the words are different, it works surprisingly well in the world as well.
Ismo is unique and truly funny, I often laugh to him just seeing him talk. I mean really, I’ve seen him talking in the morning TV and not even trying to be funny and I still laugh my ass off. If you literally want to laugh your ASS word while getting your mind blown with the world ASS, watch this.
Bugs Bunny's birthday is today, July 27. He's 83! As the image attached here says, in 1940 he made his debut in his own cartoon, after being a unnamed rabbit in a Porky Pig short in 1938. And then he became the mascot for Warner Brothers!
I'm a huge fan of Bugs, and I still watch a lot of those old Bugs shorts (especially the ones with Yosemite Sam, they're my favorite). I'm also a huge collector of Bugs toys, memorabilia, just everything. I wrote a thing about it on my cartoon blog a few years ago. 'Bugs Bunny, and how I first fell in love with cartoons': https://animatedtvblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/10/bugs-bunny-and-how-i-first-fell-in-love-with-cartoons.
Also, there's a lot of Bugs video compilations on YouTube, but did you know you can watch (and/or download!) 85 Bugs shorts at archive dot org? The link is also in my blog post above, it's SO cool these are online here.
🌌 On this day in 1978 the very first episode of the very first version of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy went out on Radio 4. We can't tell you how proud that makes us.
Here's a lovely programme about Douglas and his creation, presented by his friend John Lloyd, that went out on the 40th anniversary.
The laugh track was once a standard feature of every TV comedy, but it may now be on its final chuckle — the last major show that used one was "The Big Bang Theory," and that finished in 2019. The Atlantic's Jacob Stern writes about the half-century history of the audio irritant, which actor David Niven once called “the single greatest affront to public intelligence I know of,” and whether we'll miss it when it's gone. "For all the ire it incurred, for all the bad jokes it disguised, the laugh track was fundamentally about reproducing the experience of being part of an audience, and its decline is also the decline of communal viewership," says Stern. What's your take on the track? [Story is paywalled]
😇 "Richard Curtis made sure Geraldine had some very unclerical passions such as her love of chocolate, her fondness for a tipple and her occasional, unabashed, carnality."
Dawn French and Richard Curtis talk about their much-loved sitcom 'The Vicar of Dibley'.
There's a Channel 4 "Dispatches" exclusive announced for tonight, about UK comedy people. Dispatches doesn't usually get shown on Saturdays.
Russell Brand has already put out a YT explaining he was "promiscuous in the past" but Popbitch says there's more than one. In case you've missed what Brand is up to these days since the Sachs thing, he's a Covid denier, anti-vax, great reset, the whole shebang. Musk and Tate have defended him so far.
Carry on Camping (Gerald Thomas, 1969). Very much bang in the middle of the golden age of the Carry On cycle, this saucy seaside postcard of a movie was, back in the day, something of a Bank Holiday staple. With so many of the sixties and seventies British saucy comedy now getting the HD treatment, attention really needs to turn to this import part of lowbrow British popular culture.
British comedian Michael McIntyre has a bit in which he claims that any English word can be used to describe being drunk. Now, two German linguists have tested the claim. "It is highly surprising that drunkonyms are still under-researched from a linguistic perspective," the authors wrote in their new paper, which was published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. @arstechnica's @JenLucPiquant has the TL;DR.
The original research paper lists 546 synonyms for drunkenness. We want to know which of these four did NOT appear.
"Blazing Saddles," Mel Brooks' Western satire about a Black sheriff (Cleavon Little) appointed to save the town with drunken gunslinger, the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder), turned 50 this month. In this slide show, MovieMaker looks at how the film was made. “It was designed as an esoteric little picture. We wrote it for two weirdos in the balcony. For radicals, film nuts, guys who draw on the washroom wall — my kind of people,” Brooks told Playboy in 1975.
"Republicans are Dangerous" - Steve Hofstetter (www.youtube.com)
In this YT Short, stand-up comedian Steve Hofstetter covers some quick statistics on violent crime rates in Democrat vs Republican-controlled states.